What I Found

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“Still Life with Bible” – Vincent Van Gogh, 1885

Atheists will sometimes ask what it would take for a Christian to walk away from Christianity. I think Paul addressed that in his letter to the Corinthians when he stated that if Jesus was not raised from the dead (i.e. bodily, as an actual historical event occurring in space and time), then our faith is in vain, we are to be most pitied of all men, and we should abandon this then-false religion, for we would be false witnesses against God by saying God raised Jesus from the dead if He didn’t [1Cor 15:14-19]. This emphasis on actual, objective, historical events that could be investigated is a really bad way to start a false religion, but a great way to proclaim truth. Per the apostle Paul, Christianity stands or falls with the Resurrection.However, an atheist probably would not be content with a Christian leaving Christianity simply to turn to Judaism.  For, of course, refuting Christianity would still not eliminate the need for God. But the desire, nonetheless, is still for us to leave all religion and join their atheist ranks. So that got me thinking: what have I found in Christianity that I would be leaving if I were to oblige the atheist missionary? Well….

I have found Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover[1]; Aquinas’ First Cause[2]; the “Highest Good” that the ancient philosophers sought for; Anselm’s “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” [3]; the Necessary Being upon which all else depends for existence; the Fine-tuner of the universe that explains the Goldilocks dilemma we face when we examine the universe; the Enabler of abiogenesis, without whom life cannot come from non-life; the Source of all the information we find encoded in our own DNA; the Designer behind all the “apparent design” in biology that frustrates Richard Dawkins; the Mind that explains the consciousness of our minds that scientists can’t explain; the Truth that explains objective transcendent truth [Jn 14:6]; Love that explains how and why we love [1Jn 4:19]; the Grand Artist that explains aesthetics[4] in what should be a cold, cruel, survival-focused universe; and the Author of life [Acts 3:14-15 ESV]. It would be intellectual suicide for me to give up all that. But the atheist is asking me to do far more than just drop an intellectual stance.

I have also found the One who loved me from before the beginning of time [Rom 5:8, 2Tim 1:9, Eph 1:4, 1Jn 4:9-10]; a perfect Father [Rom 8:15-16]; the Savior of my soul [Lk 2:11, Jn 4:42]; my Redeemer who rescued me [Ps 19:14, Job 19:25]; the One who made me in His image and gives me intrinsic value [Gen 1:27, Gen 9:6, Matt 6:26]; my Mediator before a just and holy God whom I could never satisfy in my sinfulness [1Tim 2:5]; my Counselor, Advocate, and Intercessor [Jn 16:7-14, Rom 8:26-27]; my source of freedom – truly beautiful, joyous freedom! – [Jn 8:32,36]; my Comforter in times of trouble [2Cor 1:3-5]; the delight of my heart [Ps 35:9]; my Peace when all around me is turmoil [Jn 14:27, 2Thes 3:16]; my steadfast foundation in the tumultuous craziness of life [Lk 6:47-48]; my Hope of glory [Col 1:27];  and the Architect of my eternal home [Heb 11:10]. Yeah, I found all that, too.

Christianity is not simply a rational intellectual viewpoint, but a relationship with my Creator. It isn’t simply some sterile, isolated idea or opinion, but rather the very presence of my Creator. And you ask me to give up that relationship, and all those answers to life’s questions to boot, and be content with the loneliness and unanswered questions of atheism? Are you crazy?! Maybe, but I’m not!

[1] “Aristotle has an argument … which he makes in Book 8 of the Physics and uses again in Book 12 of the Metaphysics that there must be an immortal, unchanging being, ultimately responsible for all wholeness and orderliness in the sensible world.” Sachs, Joe. “Aristotle: Metaphysics”. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
[2] “It is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.”  See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Vol. I, Question 2, Article 3, 2nd way.
[3] See this previous post for a refresher of St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument, based on Plantinga’s reformulation of it last century.
[4] Or, “that best and most systematic Artisan of all”, as Nicolas Copernicus would say in his preface to “On the Revolutions”. See Nicolas Copernicus, Complete Works: On the Revolutions, translation and commentary by Edward Rosen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 4.

Some Truth About Truth

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Today, I wanted to share with you some insights about the nature of truth. I’ve shared in the past about objective truth (here, here, and here), but today I wanted to share a nicely summarized list of some of the consequences of that objectivity, drawn from Frank Turek’s and Norm Geisler’s book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. Let’s jump in!

  1. “Truth is discovered, not invented. It exists independently of anyone’s knowledge of it.” Suppose NASA were to announce tomorrow that the presence of intelligent  life had been confirmed on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. If that were true, it would not become true because they said it. It would be true based on there actually being aliens living on Titan. It would be true whether or not humans ever discovered it. There is nothing we could do to make that statement true (short of moving to Titan ourselves).
  2. “Truth is transcultural; if something is true, it is true for all people, in all places, at all times (2+2=4 for everyone, everywhere, at every time).” There is no “Western truth” versus “Eastern truth” or”modern truth” versus “ancient truth”. When the Nazis claimed Jews were subhuman, that was not true for them and false for the  rest of us; it was a lie regardless of who said it, when they said it, where they said, and whether or not their culture condoned them saying it.
  3. “Truth is unchanging, even though our beliefs about truth change.” People in our generation put an undue amount of trust in “science” to eventually reveal all knowledge and fix all problems, but the history of science is often one of trial and error. We laugh now at some of the seriously-proposed theories of only a few years ago and how far from the truth they were. But  notice that when we propose a new model to better explain gravity or the wave-like and particle-like behavior of light, it is not gravity or light that are changing, but rather our understanding of them. New theories presuppose that there is such a thing as objective truth, for it was the old theory’s “missing the mark” of an independent truth that required a new theory.
  4. “Beliefs cannot change a fact, no matter how sincerely they are held.” You can sincerely believe you can fly (unaided), but if you jump off a bridge, gravity will clear up that sincerely wrong belief very quickly. It’s good to be sincere, but we should always strive to be correct in our beliefs as well.
  5. “Truth is not affected by the attitude of the one professing it.” Nobody likes being corrected by a jerk, but humility or arrogance about the truth does not change the truthfulness of a statement. Questioning the truthfulness of a statement solely because of the attitude of the person espousing it would actually be a form of the genetic fallacy – the idea that the origin of the information alone can prove it false.
  6. “All truths are absolute truths.” There cannot be any relative truth. One might be tempted to say some statements are statements of personal truth, relative to the person making the statement and not applicable to anyone else. The statement “I like chocolate ice cream” might be true for John and not for Bob. But if we get more specific, we can see how even this can be absolute: “At 9:30 on July 11, 2017, John liked chocolate ice cream” is true for all people in all places at all times, if that particular man named John really did like chocolate ice cream then.
  7. “All truths exclude their opposites. Contrary beliefs are possible, but not contrary truths.” People like to assume things like “all religions are basically the same” without actually supporting that claim. But consider what just 3 religions say about one person in particular. Christianity claims that Jesus is God, eternal and  uncreated, the only mediator between God and man, who took on human nature and lived a perfect sinless life, gave His life as an atoning sacrifice for our sins that we may be reconciled to God, and rose from the dead, the first fruit of a future resurrection available to all who trust in Him. That’s a significant claim! Judaism claims He was a blasphemous and traitorous rabbi who deserved the death sentence He received, and importantly, stayed dead once He was killed on a Roman cross. Islam claims that He was a true prophet, but one who was spared death on the cross, never claimed to be God, and is not the source of our salvation. These are contradictory beliefs, but each is still believed by many different people. While it is possible that all religions could be false, what is completely impossible is that they could all be true when they have contradictory tenets. If one is true (like Christianity), any others that contradict it are necessarily false.
  8. Let me add one more characteristic to the list: Truth is independent of the medium used to carry it. A true statement is true regardless of whether it is handwritten on paper, spoken out loud, typed electronically, or only thought in private and never communicated. It is true whether it is in English, or Chinese, or any other language. It is not the atoms of ink embedded in a particular pattern on the paper, or the magnetized molecules forming the binary bits of electronic data on a computer hard drive, or the molecules of air in a particular waveform of sounds, or even the neurons in the brain of the person thinking about it that make it true. This idea that information is immaterial is the basis for translation: we can say that “the apple is red” and “la manzana es roja” are equivalent statements because they both convey the same immaterial concept – the specific color of a  specific object (i.e. a red apple). And they are both true statements, regardless of how the statements are communicated, if the object actually is a red apple.

Our culture today likes to say things like “everything is relative”, and “there are no absolutes.” If you’ve accepted those popular mantras, my hope is that I’ve shown you good reasons why those relativistic slogans just don’t work in real life. Objective truth has certain implications that we can see manifested in the world around us. And when we recognize that relationship between truth and reality, it empowers us to boldly discern the truth that is out there waiting for us, rather than being stymied by walls of lies masquerading as contradictory truth claims that can’t be questioned. When we recognize that real truth can’t be “true for you, but not for me”, we then have the freedom to peel back the layers of opinions and perspectives and interpretations on controversial issues until we find the real nugget of truth underneath it all. And that is a beautiful thing, my friends, and worth the work.

Points 1-7 are from Dr. Frank Turek & Dr. Norman Geisler, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), pp. 37-38.
Point 8 , regarding the immaterial nature of information (and, consequently, of true information) is from Dr. Werner Gitt, Without Excuse (Atlanta: Creation Book Publishers, 2011), p. 124.

Atheist Objections: Occam’s Razor

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William of Ockham, stained glass window in Surrey, England

I came across the following application of Occam’s Razor on the infidels.org site and thought this warranted a closer examination lest anyone be swayed by their example.

“The relevance to atheism is that we can look at two possible explanations for what we see around us:

  • There is an incredibly intricate and complex universe out there, which came into being as a result of natural processes.
  • There is an incredibly intricate and complex universe out there, and there is also a God who created the universe. Clearly this God must be of non-zero complexity.

Given that both explanations fit the facts, Occam’s Razor might suggest that we should take the simpler of the two–solution number one.”

Is this a legitimate use of Occam’s Razor? First, a refresher on Occam’s Razor. Infidels.org is correct when they say that William of Ockham (a priest, by the way) is the one commonly credited with the idea that we should “not multiply entities unnecessarily.” In other words, look for the minimum needed explanation for an event. Internet conspiracy theorists would do well to keep this principle in mind. When one sees the suspicious behavior of a couple of people,  a worldwide conspiracy should not be the first thing that comes to mind.  For instance, if an elaborate government conspiracy comprised of hundreds of people can explain the evidence, but so can two guys embezzling government funds on their own, don’t default to the giant conspiracy between the government, bankers, corporations, and space aliens unless you find further evidence that can’t be explained by just the two crooks.

Now, what is the difference between the 2 explanations for the origin of the universe above? Both accept as a given our observations of an “incredibly intricate and complex universe.” The first claims that this intricacy was the result of natural processes, while the second claims that God was added to the mix. Their conclusion is then that God is the “unnecessary entity” that Occam’s Razor advises against.  However, God is not an entity added to the natural processes of the first situation; in discussing the origin of the universe, God and natural processes are competing alternatives. Therefore, this is not a case of unnecessarily added entities. We have precisely one “entity” in each scenario: either nature alone, or an intelligent agent (i.e. God).  They are both proposed causal agents.

Let’s look at another example to explain this difference. I might observe a pot of water boiling on the stove. Is this the result of natural causes or intelligent agency? Which multiplies entities needlessly? The notion that my wife made a conscious choice to put a pot of water on the stove a finite time ago (for it hasn’t boiled dry yet) is a pretty straightforward explanation. We could step the explanation back farther to note that she first retrieved the pot from the cabinet and filled the pot with water, and at some prior point she bought the pot from the store.  But with an intelligent agent, those are hardly extraordinary possibilities.

How would a purely naturalistic explanation proceed? If there’s no agent to put the pot on the stove,  maybe an earthquake  shook it into place there, and a conveniently placed roof leak filled it full of water. A falling ceiling tile could potentially hit the switch just right to turn on the stove to heat  the water. But then where did this stove and pot and water even come from in a world where we ignore the possibility of free agents to procure these components? Well, maybe the stove is actually the result of erosion of a metal-rich piece of rock, and what appears to be copper wiring is really just the remnants of veins of copper ore. And the house it’s in is just an accumulation of storm debris. And the pot is actually a hollowed-out remnant of a meteorite. In fact, maybe a meteorite impact is why the roof leaks and the ceiling tile fell on the stove switch! Explaining the actions of free agents, even fairly simple actions, gets outlandish pretty quick when we don’t allow free agency as an explanation. But that’s nothing compared to trying to explain how everything that exists came to be by purely natural causes. But if we ignore the possibility of an agent who can choose to cause chains of events, and can choose between different options along the way, and can direct those processes through to their planned end, then we have to multiply entities needlessly, and endlessly, to compensate. And after all of our manipulation of freak accidents in just-right orders to explain what we want to have happened, we are left with a tale that smacks of ad-hoc, contrived wish fulfillment.

Does Occam’s Razor favor the naturalistic origin of the universe? No, in the end, Occam’s Razor shaves off the proposed natural causes and reveals the real cause: the intelligent, eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing Creator of the universe. Only a volitional being that existed eternally and transcended space and time could choose to bring those into existence, thus allowing any natural processes to even be possible. For natural processes are not possible without a nature to occur in, and if we’re talking about the origin of nature, then that cause must be outside of nature. Nothing can cause itself. Therefore, the most reasonable cause is a free agent outside of nature. But you can call Him God.

 

Source: https://infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/arguments.html#occam

In Defense of Logic

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I received some surprising feedback lately from a fellow Christian pushing back against my emphasis on logic. The charge was even made that I “idolized” logic. Surprising (and saddening) as this is, I suppose it is worthwhile to review the role of logic in our lives. Now, I would never want to put anything, even logic, before God, but the simple fact of the matter is that we really can’t know God without logic. Don’t believe me? Let’s dig into that today by looking at 3 questions: What is logic? Is it necessary? And how does it apply to our understanding of God?

  1. First, what is logic? Is it some mysterious type of thought used by Vulcans, Mentats, and computers that is antithetical to Christianity?  Hardly. Logic is to thought as grammar is to language; it is the structure of thought. Logic is simply the organization of our thoughts into coherent structures that can have discernible meaning.  Without any further clarification, the statement “I am 5 feet tall and 6 feet tall”, would be nonsense to you. You might ask if I meant that my height was between those 2 numbers, or if I was talking about at different times of my life, or you might ask what the punchline was. Why would you not just accept that I existed in the form of 2 different body heights at the same time? Because it’s not possible. And we have a law in logic that puts that common sense notion into words. The law of non-contradiction states (in Aristotle’s formulation), that “the same property cannot both belong and not belong to the same subject at the same time in the same respect.” To have a body height of 5′ and 6′ at the same time, measured the same way, would necessarily be a contradiction and would be physically impossible. Because we cannot conceive any way something physical could be 2 different lengths at the same time in the same way, contradictions like that are truly nonsense. Now, it’s not like Aristotle (or anyone else) invented the laws of logic, anymore than Newton or Einstein invented gravity; these laws simply describe relationships that already exist. Logic is not a human invention, just a human discovery.
  2. Is logic really necessary? As Peter Kreeft points out in the preface to his logic textbook, “We all have used logic already, unconsciously, many times every day.” [1] He goes on to say, “One of the best remedies for bad reading and writing is good logic.” [2] Another professor laments that “logic is the very backbone of a true education, and yet it is seldom taught as such in American schools.”[3] While philosophy professors may bemoan the lack of logic instruction outside of their classrooms, that alone doesn’t make it actually necessary. In fact, you can certainly think without knowing logic, but only in the same way you can speak and write without knowing grammar – in both cases, the results will not be as coherent. Of course, the basics of logic, like the rather obvious law of non-contradiction,  are what we tend to call “common sense”, so even without knowing logic, it’s hard to not use it, even if used poorly at times. In fact, one typically has to resort to logic in any attempt to argue against it.
  3. So how does logic fit in with knowing God?  Classical logic systematizes our thoughts into three acts of the mind: understanding, judgement, and reasoning.
    • Understanding (or simple apprehension) is where we define our terms, where we understand what it is we are thinking about.  When we say that “God is good,” what do we mean by the terms “God” and “good”?  Many an unnecessary argument rages on because two opponents use the same terms but mean different things.
    • Judgement is that act of the mind where we make truth claims that must be accepted or rejected.Once we have our terms defined, judgement is what we say about those terms, those objects of our thoughts. We think about God, and judge that He is good. Our judgements are statements that are either true or false. There is no middle state between true and false, existence and non-existence, or any other condition and its negation (this is called the law of the excluded middle). If there is a middle option, then we have not been sufficiently specific in our initial statement.
    • Reasoning is where we establish why our judgements are true. This is the justification, warrant, or basis, for our statements or beliefs. Why do we think God is good? Think of valid reasoning as the foundation stones that support the structure made from true judgement of clear terms. Without valid reasoning, you can be accidentally correct about something, but your belief is just a house of cards waiting to be knocked over. Too many people rightly believe various truths about God, but for reasons like how it makes them feel, or that their parents told them these things. If they never dig any deeper to the real foundational reasons, then they are easy prey for the first skeptic that comes along and knocks these false supports out from under them.

Logic clarifies what is believed, deduces the necessary consequences of the belief, and applies it to difficult situations. [4]Let’s look at a prime example: the Trinity. This is core Christian doctrine. Indeed, it’s been said, “In the confession of the Trinity throbs the heart of the Christian religion: every error results from, or upon deeper reflection may be traced to, a wrong view of this doctrine.” [5] So why do we believe that God is triune? Because the church fathers had to wrestle with the tension between the clear teaching in the Bible regarding three divine Persons, and the equally clear teaching that the Lord our God is one God. But they very laboriously worked through precisely defining terms, judging what were true statements about those terms, reasoning through the serious implications of what they knew to be true, and applying that logic to discover this truth about the nature of God that we call the Trinity. The Trinitarian formulation is the result of resolving a paradox through logical reasoning.

As Professor Kreeft points out, the simplest and most important reason for studying logic is that “logic helps us to find truth”. [6] Jesus tells us in John 14:6 that He is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Any tool that draws us closer to truth can draw us closer to Him. And that’s worth defending.

[1] Peter Kreeft, Socratic Logic (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2010), p. 12.
[2] ibid. p140.
[3] D.Q. McInerny, Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking, (New York: Random House, 2005), p. ix.
[4] Kreeft, p. 4.
[5] Herman Bavink, The Doctrine of God, p.285, as quoted in Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), p. 247.
[6] Kreeft, p.7.

An Uncomfortable God

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“Christ with Thorns”, by Carl Heinrich Bloch, 1865-1879.

I was listening to an old teaching series by R.C. Sproul on “The Psychology of Atheism“, where he mentioned briefly that the God of Christianity was not a “comfortable god”, and I thought that insight worth pointing out here. Skeptics may like to believe that the Christian’s God is simply make-believe like the gods of ancient Greece or Rome, or the animistic gods of primitive cultures, but there’s a problem. God isn’t like any of the gods of every other religion. Look at any of those “gods” and you find very flawed, finite, humanesque creatures – “supermen” and “superwomen”, perhaps, but still no better than the humans they ruled over. One glaring example is that they could be bribed, but not so with God. While we might very much want justice against those who have harmed us, we tend to like a god that we can convince to “let us slide” when we are the guilty party. But the Bible is clear that there is no partiality with God [Deut 10:17, Rom 2:11, Eph 6:9], as much as we might prefer it at times.  Indeed, God will hold us accountable for every word and thought [Matt 12:36-37, Rom 14:12], even if we go through all the motions of fulfilling our obligations to Him [1Sam 15:22]. That’s a sobering thought for anyone. There’s no faking it with God, for He sees through our masks to the real us, the part of us we dare not reveal to our closest friend. That perfect, penetrating vision of us is what made philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre shudder, but that makes for an uncomfortably odd creation of our imagination if that’s all God is. But it gets stranger. Christianity alone teaches this concept of grace, that it is “by grace you have been saved,” that it is not because of anything we could do that we might be able to brag about [Eph 2:8-9]. As if God seeing through our facades and judging the ulterior motives of even our “good deeds” with perfect justice wasn’t frightening enough, there is no possibility of bribery or earning favor with God: it’s all on His discretion. Salvation is His free gift. Why make up a deity that puts us in the awkward position of being helpless to save ourselves, puts our best efforts to “be good” to shame, and holds us to a standard we could never meet? What would we gain from inventing a god like that?

On the other hand, what if the very existence of a physical universe required a first cause that existed outside of space and time in order for the effect of the universe to occur? This is simply applying the law of causality – that every effect requires an antecedent cause beyond itself. But if time and space had a beginning and are an effect, then their cause must exist beyond those dimensions. And that cause must be eternally self-existent. So then this cause would be eternal and ontologically necessary. But in that case, if there is ever to be a change in conditions, that first cause can’t be simply a physical force like gravity (note that there wouldn’t have been anything for a force to act on prior to anything existing…); rather, it has to be an agent that can choose to act, to create a beginning.  What if the design of our universe required an intelligent agent of power, genius, and foresight to the Nth degree? Would it not be appropriate to call that agent omnipotent and omniscient? What if that agent that brings everything into existence therefore has the rightful claim of ownership of everything He made? Would we not say He was “sovereign”? But then, what if this Supreme Being wasn’t simply some powerful universal tyrant, but was loving, the very source of love, in fact [1Jn 4:8,10,19, Rom 5:8]? And what if, in creating creatures “in His own image” who chose to rebel against Him and make a mess out of things, He still loved us? Could He not reach out to us, and communicate to us, and work to redeem us from our brokenness, and reconcile us to Him [2Cor 5:19-21]? But if He were perfectly just, as well, the crimes of mankind must still be paid for, no matter how much He loved us. We can easily see that granting a serial killer a pardon would be a great offense to the families of his victims desiring justice. But under God’s perfect standard, we are all guilty [Rom 3:10,23, 6:23]. How would He demonstrate perfect love and perfect justice without compromising either? What if He, out of His unfathomable love, paid the penalty for our transgressions, and offered us the reward: new life for the death row inmate!? [Rom 5:6,8-10]

I know that’s a lot of “what ifs” there, and covers a whole lot of ground in one paragraph, but if those are actually the way things are, then Christianity has unparalleled explanatory power for what we find when we try to investigate where we came from, where we’re going, and everything in between. And when we do start doing the serious digging, we do find those to be the case. We see philosophically the need for an uncaused first cause and that it has to be independent of the time-space framework. And so far as cosmologists have been able to verify with scientific observation, space and time really do appear to have a definite beginning, confirming what we deduce through philosophy. The more we learn of the workings of our universe, the more mind-bogglingly complex designs we discover – ones that put anything humans have ever invented to shame. And we see this from the macroscopic systems of our universe to the microscopic systems of our cells and every level in between. We have an innate sense that things are broken in our world; it seems like we were meant for more, but things have been twisted and corrupted, and that things are not as they should be. We feel a tension between humanity’s call to greatness on the one hand, and our abysmal wretchedness and inability to fulfill that purpose on our own on the other hand.

The Christian God would not be a very comfortable, soothing figment of our imagination if that’s all He were. Not only does He tower over us, but He also stoops to pick us up, yet not of any merit of ours, but only out of His own love, and mercy, and grace. He destroys all our pretensions, turns our world upside-down, and actually changes us from the inside out. And that’s the uncomfortable truth that we could never invent.

The Unwanted Cure

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“Family Doctor”, by Grant Wood, 1940.

What would you do if you found out you had cancer? You’d probably be in shock first, but as that initial shock wore off, what would be your plan? Would you aggressively fight for your life? Would you follow your doctor’s advice like you never have before? Would you sell all you had to finance treatment? Would you consider experimental medical procedures  if more typical medical solutions didn’t work? Or would you just carry on with life as it was before you got the diagnosis? Would pursuing the cure be too much work to bother with?

We all have a disease – a terminal disease called sin [Rom 6:23].  This disease has a cure, though. That cure is called the Gospel. Gospel literally means “good news”. If you had an advanced stage of cancer, and certain death was fast approaching, and someone told you that there was a treatment regimen that would cure you of the cancer, saying that was “good news” would be an understatement! But getting the benefits of that cure requires something so basic, you might not think about it: it requires admitting that you have cancer. You obviously wouldn’t need a cancer cure if you didn’t have cancer.

But the Gospel is a cure for a problem we don’t want to admit we have. Like an alcoholic or drug addict, admitting we have a problem is the first step. People can see God’s grace as offensive because they don’t think they need it. I’m afraid one reason people in our generation think they don’t need it is because all they’ve heard from Christians is “God loves you.” And while that’s true, they hear that over and over again and think, “Why wouldn’t He? I’m a pretty good person.” I’ve had several friends and family members now that have battled cancer, undergoing surgeries, chemo, radiation, or some combination. Some won that fight, others lost. But chemo and radiation and surgeries are only ever good news when you understand that your sickness is going to kill you. Almost every book in the New Testament warns us that if we choose to follow Christ, we will suffer trials, hardships, mockings, torture, imprisonment, and death. Is that being overly dramatic? Ask the Christians being beheaded in the Middle East, or the Christians imprisoned in North Korea and Iran. Read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Read Paul’s account of his own sufferings. Why go through that? All of those people understood what God saved them from, and just how good the Good News really was. As Peter said when Jesus asked if the 12 disciples would abandon Him like the fickle crowds had, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life.” [Jn 6:68 NET]

So is there anything that confirms the diagnosis? The Law of God is the test that reveals the need for the cure of the gospel of grace. His Law reveals our inability to keep His perfect standard. It shows us that being “pretty good” doesn’t help. We can win the Nobel Peace Prize, and every humanitarian award there is, and still find ourselves failing to meet God’s perfect standard just like Hitler and all the worst examples of humanity. Talk about a blow to one’s pride! The best we could ever hope to do isn’t enough. That’s the bad news; that’s the cancer diagnosis. We’re going to die without intervention. But it gets worse. We’re going to die as rebels and traitors before a perfectly just God. And He wouldn’t be just if He didn’t punish lawbreakers.  What are we to do? What can we do? Nothing, really. You might wonder, “Are we just ‘dead men walking’ then? Pretty much. “That’s kind of depressing, isn’t it?” Yep….

Thankfully, that’s not the end of the story. Where we are powerless to stop this disease, God provides a cure, as only He can. And notice the design of His cure: both powerful to save, and available to save. God’s salvation is not limited only to the rich who can afford it, or the genius who can comprehend it, or those of some supposedly superior race who deserve it, or of a particular societal class entitled to it, or to those born into the right family to inherit it, or those who have lived long enough and worked hard enough to earn the cure, or to those who showed the most potential. Those are all ways us humans might try to determine who qualifies for something so precious, if we were in charge. Rather, God sent Jesus, his only Son, to live the perfect life we never could, to fulfill the Law in every detail, and to be the only sacrifice that could satisfy what justice demanded. God’s gracious gift of salvation is open to the Wall Street banker and the Main Street beggar, the quantum physicist and the ignorant child, people of all races, the upper crust and poorest of the poor and all the middle class in between, the zealot that has sought after God since he was in a crib and the militant atheist on his deathbed, the sons and daughters of privilege to the loneliest orphan, the child prodigy to the unknown pariah. Maybe you’ve heard Romans 3:23, that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…”, and felt the condemnation there. That’s good, actually, but only as a start! The truth hurts, but nothing like the consequences of ignoring it. Now keep reading to the end of that sentence in verse 24: “… being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus.” [Rom 3:23-24] We’ve all sinned, but see the unsurpassable love of God!  – that we may be justified before Him simply by trusting in the redeeming work of Jesus. Have you acknowledged the sickness of your sin? Have you laid aside your pride and trusted Jesus alone to cleanse you of the gangrene of your soul? Or will you choose to turn down the free cure?

For further reading, Alexander Maclaren does a beautiful job, far better than I ever could, of explaining the passage from Romans referenced above.
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scriptures: Romans & Corinthians, Romans3:19-26. http://www.ccel.org/ccel/maclaren/rom_cor.ii.vii.html

 

A Two-Pronged Attack

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Infantry land on Utah Beach on the east side of Cotentin Peninsula, while Airborne parachuted in from the west. US Army Brochure.

73 years ago, on June 6, 1944, the largest amphibious assault in history hit the beaches of Normandy, France, to begin a slow marathon to Berlin, the seat of Nazi power. To facilitate gaining a foothold on the Nazi-controlled continent, the landings at 5 separate beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the Normandy coast were also coordinated with airborne infantry dropping behind enemy lines to clear the way inland for the (hopefully) successful beach landings. The foothold was costly and took time, but it eventually led to Allied victory over Hitler. But what I want to discus today is a different kind of attack: one on a grander scale even than D-Day; an attack with bigger objectives than the liberation of Europe from Nazi occupation; an attack formulated by a greater Supreme Commander than General Eisenhower.

What I’m writing of is God’s assault that He launches against the walled fortress of each human heart. You see, we are rebels every one, fit only for court-martial and subsequent execution by a perfectly just Ruler over all.  When the standard is perfection, there are no “little sins”, no peccadilloes, no “white lies”, no minor indiscretions. Not acing that test is the same as failing, and since none of us are perfect, we all fail. But God, in His sovereignty and amazing love and grace, doesn’t leverage His omnipotent power against us, obliterating us like so many flies in a nuclear blast.  Instead, His purpose was not to destroy us rebels, but to redeem us, to transform “children of wrath” [Eph 2:3] into “adopted children of God” [Eph 1:5].  How does He do that? There are many ways to analyze His strategy, but I see a two-pronged attack of reason and love at work.

We find justification for believing in God’s existence and in the truth of what the Bible records about Him through science and philosophy, or our observations of the world around us and our critical thinking. We can apply logic to the question of God’s existence in the form of arguments such as the Cosmological, Teleological, Axiological, and Ontological arguments, among others, and rationally deduce that God exists. With the Cosmological and Teleological arguments in particular, we can support those premises with our scientific observations of the universe around us. Indeed, the apostle Paul tells us that God’s eternal power and divine nature can be clearly seen from what is created, so that men are without excuse [Rom 1:20]. We can examine the historicity of the biblical manuscripts, their supreme coherence, both internally and with the external world,  and their explanatory power in comparison to other religions and ideologies, and see that Christianity provides the  most reasonable explanation of human history, of our paradoxical greatness and wretchedness, as Pascal would say.

Not everyone would surrender based on evidence and reasoning, though. Some might shy away from those avenues to God, thinking they were too complicated to bother with, or beyond their abilities. Some on the other end of the spectrum would dig in their  heels all the more in response to reasons contrary to their views. They would feel the directness of cold, hard logic, and batten the doors of their fortress all the more. Childishly, we can resent being told anything contrary to our desire for personal autonomy, even when it’s for our own good. But defenses strengthened against one attack may yield to another. And God has a flank attack:  He loves us. Not with some momentary warm fuzzy kind of so-called love that soon passes, but with a sacrificial love for those who hated Him. For, “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” [Rom 5:8, I Jn 4:10,19], “the just for the unjust” [1 Pet 3:18]. Because He created us in His image [Gen 1:27], we have intrinsic value, even if the rest of the world tells us we aren’t smart enough, attractive enough, cool enough, or any other comparison they can find to feel better at our expense.  And when people look at our past mistakes and ask, “Who could ever love someone like that?”, the answer is, God. He did, He does, and He will. Love is a powerful craving in all of us, and we seek it in all the worst places sometimes. And those pursuits don’t satisfy, so we keep running to the next big thing that we think will be the end of our search. All the while, our loving Creator awaits, extending an invitation to each of us, not desiring that any should perish {Ezek 33:11], but still obligated by His perfectly just nature to punish all who reject his loving offer of salvation [Rom 2:4-6].

Some yield to God’s logic and others to His love,  but they are just two sides of the same divine battle plan to redeem a chosen people. For me, 25 years ago, my sinfulness, God’s perfection, and my need to come to Him on His terms rather than mine were as obvious and rational to me as 2+2 equaling 4. There was simply no justifiable reason to reject God’s gift. And the deeper I have dug, and the more I have researched other worldviews and religions, the more I “know whom I have believed and I am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him until that day” [2 Tim 1:12]. Whatever way God uses to reach you, don’t reject His offer. It does require unconditional surrender on our part – something our prideful hearts bristle at – but like the Nazis in WWII, we’re actually on the wrong side, and the best thing we can do is surrender to our just, but loving, Lord.

Tsunamis and the Problem of Evil

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The Wave, or My Destiny, by Victor Hugo, 1857

Last time, I mentioned something I came across while researching new design provisions for tsunami hazards that helped explain why the biblical manuscripts are reliable. But tsunamis often play a more adversarial role as a common objection to the Christian conception of God being both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. And it’s easy to see why: tsunamis are natural disasters that typically occur with little warning and can cause massive loss of life. The Indonesian Ocean earthquake of December 26, 2004, and its ensuing tsunami killed over 200,000 people. That’s more people than the entire population of the city where I work. Gone, mostly in that first day. The thought is staggering. But it doesn’t stop there. Those who survive a tsunami are often left homeless, destitute, with nothing more than the clothes on their back. No shelter, no transportation, no food, and no way to purchase any of those things. While many are killed, several times that number are adversely affected, many for the rest of their lives. It’s easy to see that situation and ask, “Where was God then? How could He allow all this suffering?”

That’s really the heart of the so-called “Problem of Evil”: How could a good God let tragedies happen if He is in control, powerful enough to stop it, and not evil Himself? Other cases of human suffering used to exemplify the problem of evil can often be traced back to human malevolence or irresponsibility, both the results of free choices made by humans. Think of the suffering caused by Hitler, or of birth defects caused by someone dumping toxic chemicals into a river feeding a community’s water supply. To eliminate those kinds of evil would seem to require either constant direct counteraction of human free will to negate the effects of our choices, or elimination of our free will altogether. But “natural evil” – events that do not appear to be traceable to humans, but still cause suffering – would seem to lead back to God. Do they incriminate God? Not necessarily. Let me give 3 reasons why I think not.

  • I’ve previously written (here) about how earthquakes actually appear to be a necessary part of the life cycle of earth and how astrobiologists searching for extraterrestrial life are theorizing that plate tectonics would be a requirement of any other planet for it to support complex life. Tsunamis are a necessary byproduct of certain types of earthquakes. The good news is that only subduction zones where  one tectonic plate dives under another (or is subducted) appear capable of producing tsunamis; the bad news is that when one of those faults suddenly displaces a large volume of water, a wave results that will become a tsunami as it nears shore. That’s just the conservation of energy at work. This subduction is part of the continuous recycling of our planetary crust, but thankfully, the resulting earthquakes and ensuing side-effect of tsunamis are not a continuous effect.
  •  God has given us intelligence, creativity, and skills to devise protection from natural disasters. A webinar I watched recently for continuing education was explaining how to design buildings for the severe loadings from waves and debris that occur in tsunamis. We engineers tend to think we’ve covered all our bases when we design a building for wind, rain, snow,  seismic, and maybe even flood loads (besides the normal occupancy loads). But then in a tsunami, your building might actually get assaulted by other buildings swept off their foundations, a flotilla of shipping containers, a small fleet of cars and trucks, or a yacht or two. Objects tend to not stay put, and instead become very heavy projectiles. But the engineer presenting the webinar pointed out that some buildings in the well-documented and analyzed 2011 Japan Tsunami actually did remarkably well. While the economic impact of the Japan tsunami was enormous, the death toll was less than 1/10th of the that of the 2004 tsunami. Well-designed buildings can contribute to reducing the effects of these events. We could take that rather expensive lesson learned and start designing for tsunamis like we do for earthquakes and hurricanes. And while the earthquake-induced wave that will become a tsunami as it nears shore can cross the deeper ocean at speeds of over 500mph, we now have an early warning network established to warn distant areas. This can help provide critical time for people to utilize the best option: evacuation to higher ground. Interestingly, even without advanced technology, one community in Japan was safe from the 2011 tsunami because, after getting decimated by 2 previous tsunamis in the last 120 years, they permanently moved the town to higher ground and erected a stone monument instructing residents to not build below that elevation.  That may not be an appealing option to some, but it was one decision that people could make that saved their lives.
  • Lastly, there are simply some virtues that cannot exist without adversity. Bravery, courage, compassion, empathy, mercy – these are not possible in a perfect world. Isn’t it interesting how people can come together and set aside their differences to help others when a tragedy strikes? We see some of the most beautiful stories of love and compassion and unity come out of disasters. Good times seem to magnify even petty differences and inconveniences in our minds. We focus on our different skin color and culture and language and politics and whatnot so much of the time. But then in times of disaster, we gain an all-too-brief moment of  perspective and are reminded of our similarities. That grieving man holding his dead son,  that woman searching the lists of the dead for her husband, that little brother and sister orphaned and doing the best they can to look out for each other – those could be our family, our friends, us. And strangers become friends in need, and we give money, and blood, and blankets, and clothes, and food, and medicine, and our time, and whatever else we can, to help people a half a world away that we’ve never met. Rescuers work with seemingly superhuman endurance to save just one more person, because every life matters. Many share what resources they can to help; some travel to these places and are changed, and spend the rest of their lives helping others, and inspiring the rest of us. But virtues like these have no outlet where there is no need.

Are tsunamis an indictment against God? I don’t think so.  They are an unpredictable (so far), but necessary, part of our world’s life cycle. Nevertheless, they are also one we can use our God-given minds to mitigate. They put our daily pettiness in perspective, reminding us in graphic terms of the urgency to tell the world the good news of the gospel and eternal life [Rom 10:14-15], and of the command to “love our neighbor as ourselves” [Lk 10:25-37].

Why We Don’t Clean Up the Bible

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A Depiction of Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery, by Vasily Polenov, 1888

Ever had junk accumulate around your house until you finally got so sick of seeing it every day that you did some major purging? Sell it, give it away, throw it away -who cares, as long as the mess goes away? What about the Bible? Is there accumulated junk in the Bible? And if there were, shouldn’t it be eliminated?

Well, there actually are some cases of questionable material in the Bible. That may come as a shock for some Christians, while some skeptics might be saying, “Tell me something I don’t know.” But not so fast. While skeptics like Bart Ehrman make much of the textual variants between different manuscripts, like copying errors, and scribal additions and deletions, the vast majority of these variants are typos and spelling differences.  Also, the enormous quantity (and quality) of manuscripts from different times and places  allows us to trace the development of these differences and have a high degree of confidence in what the originals said. For more on the fascinating field of textual criticism, I’d encourage you to check out Dr. Daniel Wallace’s work.[1] But what about cases like the Pericope Adulterae, the story of the woman caught in adultery found in John 7:53-8:12? This is a favorite story of many Christians, but the evidence weighs heavily against it being an authentic part of John’s gospel.  If that’s the case, and we really are concerned about truth – especially in our Holy Scriptures – why does it remain in the Bible?

To answer that, let me provide a more contemporary example. Four of the states I’m licensed in fall under new design provisions for tsunamis that are being introduced for the first time in the US later this year. In the course of researching the new provisions, I came across an interesting article on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s  website regarding their investigation and compilation of historical weather data [2].  While tsunamis and hurricanes can both generate large amounts of flooding, they have fundamentally different causes. Hurricanes are atmospheric events, while tsunamis are ground events (typically earthquake-induced, but also possible from landslides, like a 600′ high tsunami in Alaska in 2015 [3]). As it stands now, only the western coast of the US and Hawaii are considered in the new tsunami risk maps, due to two fault lines of the type that can cause tsunamis. But if a tsunami had been recorded on the east coast or gulf coast, then there would be obvious precedent for requiring us engineers to consider that risk in our designs in those areas as well. Well, there was a particular case in 1909 of a reported “tidal wave” sweeping over Grand Isle, Louisiana after a hurricane, killing hundreds. Was this tragic event tied to the hurricane, or was there an earthquake along an unmapped fault line in the gulf? Further investigation and computer simulation of the storm revealed the “tidal wave” to be part of the hurricane storm surge. While no less tragic for the families of those killed, establishing the true cause of past events like this helps us to design for them correctly and save lives in the future. Now, did NOAA delete this entry out of their Tsunami database? No, and here’s their reasoning:

So how does NOAA handle a spurious data record like this one? Do we delete the record? Oddly enough, we leave it in! We include notations that “debunk” the original tsunami designation, set the validity field to 0 (not a tsunami), and indicate that this event is of meteorological origin. If we removed the record entirely, it is likely that it would show up again in some future book or Web site, unopposed by the facts. Someone would email NOAA and say, “I found this great info about a tsunami in Louisiana in 1909. Why isn’t it listed it in your database?”

Can you see the application to biblical manuscripts? When copying manuscripts and confronted with questionable source material, scribes down through the centuries would typically err on the side of including the questionable material, just like NOAA did when they included the 1909 tidal wave in their database in 2002. But the scribes, like NOAA, would also add marginalia – margin notes and symbols – to denote concerns with the text of a passage. Now, if you’ve read almost any modern translation of the Bible, you’ve seen notes in the margin telling you things like, “Some early manuscripts do not contain this sentence”, or in the case of the adulterous woman passage, “The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53-8:12.” You’ll find similar statements at John 5:3, Mark 16:9-20, and 1 John 5:7-8. The idea is that it’s better to include questionable data, duly noted as such, than to possibly eliminate divinely inspired teaching. Then, later, as more and more manuscripts are discovered and catalogued, if the passage is confirmed to be authentic, it hasn’t been lost due to overzealous “cleaning.” And if it’s confirmed as not genuine, then it is noted as such in each translation, so nobody has to be fooled by an appeal to some “shocking, scandalous, newly discovered Bible verses, hidden for centuries.” Like NOAA, we want to be able to oppose any future challenges with the facts.

Indeed, Bible translations are remarkable in their transparency, noting suspect passages, textual variants, and alternate translations quite openly rather than trying to hide them. But that’s because integrity to God’s Word is of utmost importance to the Christian, and most especially to the translator with the sacred duty of making God’s Word known to people in their own language. Despite the skeptic’s cynicism, we Christians understand that we are accountable before God for how we handle His Word [2 Tim 2:15].  And woe to the one who tries to corrupt it [Rev 22:18-19]. That’s one reason why we don’t translate from previous translations, as some uninformed skeptics like to think. Rather, we go back to the original languages (Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic), and retranslate them into the current vernacular of English, Spanish, German, and so on. And contrary to skeptics’ claims of Bible translation being like the “telephone game”, as we find more (and earlier) manuscripts, our translations become more authentic, not less. In fact, check out Daniel Wallace’s site [4] to see their extremely high-resolution (50 megapixel) photographs of many of the world’s surviving Greek manuscripts (350,000 images and counting). You simply can’t beat that kind of transparency: you can judge the translators’ interpretation of the source material for yourself. So stop blindly accepting the allegations of skeptics about the Bible and start reading all those margin notes yourself! Study up, take Dr. Wallace’s Credo House course on textual criticism like I did, learn some Greek or Hebrew, look at ancient manuscripts – dig deep!  If you do, you’ll find the Bible to be reliable in both its transmission and its content. But then the question remains: what are you gonna do with that discovery? Our Creator, who gave us the message that is the Bible, doesn’t want to be your hobby, and He tells us as much in there. There’s something to think on next time you open up a Bible.

[1] http://www.credocourses.com/product/textual-criticism/
[2] https://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/magazine/tsunami_database/or_stormsurge.html
[3] https://www.adn.com/alaska-life/we-alaskans/2016/09/11/collapsing-alaska-mountains-southeast-alaska-landslides-and-tsunamis-on-the-rise/
[4] The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts

Gratitude for a Godly Mother

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“Young Mother Gazing at her Child”- William Adolphe Bouguereau, 1871

Here in the US, we just celebrated Mother’s Day, a day we set aside to honor our mothers that put up with the backaches, nausea, hormonal fluctuations, mood swings, new wardrobe requirements, and various other painful trials of pregnancy and delivery that I can’t even begin to understand, in order to bring us into this big exciting world. But if that weren’t enough, then there’s those years of caring for that precious new life, providing total care 24/7 at the beginning, then teaching us to take care of ourselves more and more, until we’re finally ready to head off on our own. They sacrifice so much, and pour such a large chunk of their lives into preparing us for our own lives as adults. A lot of times it takes many years, and the benefit of hindsight, for us to appreciate just how much they sacrificed for us. For me, Mom wasn’t just my mother, but also my school teacher, as I had the rich blessing of homeschooling from 1st through 12th grade. Having the same ornery, smart aleck student for 12 years is another testament to the supreme patience and perseverance of my mother!

Looking back, I think of the things I got from Mom. There were the genetic traits that I inherited from Mom (for better or worse). There were character traits like honesty, patience, integrity, and frugality, that I learned from her direct teaching and her consistent example. There was academic knowledge that she imparted as a teacher. There were those foundational life skills that one can’t go very far without. But there is something far greater than any of those that Mom gave me: she consistently modeled, day in and day out, what it was to be a Christian. While I credit her with jump-starting my love of reading from a very young age, the book I remember her reading the most was the Bible, hands-down. Mom sought out wise spiritual mentors and taught me to do the same. Mom was diligent in not taking me to church as a chore to check off the list each week, but rather as a loving duty [Heb 10:25], a joyous privilege [Ps 27:4], and a learning opportunity [Acts 2:42] many didn’t have. I still remember her writing encouraging letters to Christians in atheist Russia, imprisoned for their faith [Heb 13:3], and standing up for the innocent unborn, murdered by abortionists here in the US [Jer 22:3].  She backed up her beliefs with action.

Would I be a Christian today if Mom hadn’t been such an example? I would say that, in His sovereignty, God could’ve brought other people into my life to fulfill that role. But it wasn’t necessary, for Mom did “train me up in the way I should go” [Pr 22:6], and for that I am eternally grateful. The apostle Paul was right when he compared all his knowledge and accomplishments and status to mere rubbish compared to the surpassing value of knowing Christ. [Phil 3:7-11] When she consistently pointed me toward Jesus, Mom directed me toward the One who surpasses all that I could ever desire in life.

When I think of my Mom, I remember the words of the apostle Paul to Timothy: “For I am mindful of the sincere faith within you, which first dwelt in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and I am sure that it is in you as well.” [2 Tim 1:5] Here we see a beautiful tradition of familial discipleship in Timothy’s family. It is unfortunate that we men so often forsake our leadership role, and place all the burden of spiritual discipleship on the mother of the family, but I thank God that so many of them over the centuries rose to the challenge and discipled us children well, preparing us not just for life, but for eternal life.

Of course, we are still responsible for our own decisions; our mothers can’t drag us into heaven against our will. But here’s what we can do:

  • if you’re a Christian who grew up with a godly mother’s influence in your life, thank God for that head start you were given, and thank her if she’s still alive.
  • If you’re a Christian in spite of not having a godly mother in your life, choose to give your kids the head start you didn’t have, and be that primary godly influence in their lives. Remember that the church’s responsibility is to equip you to do God’s work, at home and abroad, but discipling your kids is the duty of you, the parent.
  • If you never had that godly influence in your life, and aren’t a Christian now, then ask yourself right now, “If Christianity were true, would I be willing to become a Christian?” If not, why not? I’ll warn you ahead of time – if you seek the truth, you’ll find Christ. And when you do, commit to being that godly mother (or father, grandparent, friend, mentor) that every kid needs.
  • And lastly, if you’re that unrepentant child that a godly mother somewhere would like to drag into heaven with them, kicking and screaming, there’s room for gratitude on your part, too. You have a mother that loves you greatly if she desires your eternal salvation, and is willing to harass you about it. That’s tough love there, my friend. Give her a hug even if you vehemently disagree with her, but be forewarned: if she’s a Christian, she knows some real truth you haven’t caught on to yet. So mull over that question about Christianity being true above, and don’t be disrespecting yo’ mama!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there!

At the intersection of faith and design