Christianity has an interesting history with the study of the physical world. The Scientific Revolution took place in Western Civilization in part because of significant Christian presuppositions, such as: 1) the physical world is real and not merely an illusion, so it’s worth our time to study it; 2) it was created by God, the supreme intelligence, so it must have an orderliness to it that can be discovered; 3) the physical world was created by God but is not itself divine, thus it would not be improper to run experiments on it; and 4) God entrusted the physical world to the care of humans, so we have a mandate to gain a better understanding of it.
Reflections From a Follower of Christ
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Monday, February 26, 2024
The Seven Deadly Spins--Physicalism
Thursday, February 22, 2024
The Seven Deadly Spins--Scientism
“That’s just your opinion!” This phrase has become the rhetorical trump card in our society today. If someone makes a claim you don’t like, rather than go to all the trouble of proving that their claim is false, you can instead label their claim as an opinion and thereby escape from any pressure to believe it. After all, opinions really are just beliefs that flow out of personal perspective or preference. I’m not obligated to hold your opinions and you’re not obligated to hold mine. If someone claims to know something, however, that’s a different ballgame. Knowledge is based on facts that anyone can sort through for themselves, so if you can show me that the facts of a matter are such and such, then I can’t dismiss your claim as mere opinion. I either have to agree with your claim or show that you’ve misunderstood the facts (I can also withhold judgment until I’ve had a chance to think it through, but I can’t reasonably say you’re wrong without showing why).
Thursday, January 11, 2024
The Seven Deadly Spins--Skepticism about Morality
It’s often said in our culture today, “You shouldn’t push your morality on others.” If this statement was simply used to argue that we should use persuasion rather than threats of force when we discuss morality, no one should object to that. But more often, there’s an unspoken claim that lies behind this statement; a claim that sounds something like this: “You shouldn’t push your morality on others—because what’s right and what’s wrong is just a matter of personal opinion.” Increasingly, our culture asserts that morality is a realm in which there are no objective standards that apply to everyone. We are told that each person must decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong and to tell another person that he’s done wrong would just be, well, wrong! It seems that the only sin in our society today is to tell another person that he’s sinned.
Tuesday, January 2, 2024
The Seven Deadly Spins--Skepticism about Truth
It’s true—our society is pretty confused these days about truth and whether we can know it. Some speak of “your truth” and “my truth,” as though truth is no different than one’s personal opinion. Others are even more skeptical, declaring that there simply is no truth to be known—expect perhaps in a discipline like science.
Wednesday, December 13, 2023
The Seven Deadly Spins--Nominalism
Trying to understand our culture today is a lot like showing up late to a movie—important things happened before you arrived, but since you’re not aware of them, you’re struggling to understand what’s unfolding before you right now. So it is in our present time. Many people are looking at the ideas being embraced in our culture and are asking, “How can my neighbor (or friend or family member) believe THAT!?”
Spiritually, we know that the root of all problems and false ideas in our society is sin. The human race is in rebellion against God; we don’t want to accept things the way He created them. Sin is the problem causing trouble in all societies and yet, societies manifest this struggle with sin in different ways. Differences in the intellectual soil of societies produce different false ideas and thus different problems.
In my next few articles, I’d like to dig down into the intellectual soil of our society to uncover the factors producing false ideas around us today. I hope this project won’t seem out of place—my colleagues who also write in this column do a good job of taking us to the Scriptures, so I’m confident that contribution will continue. Perhaps my short project will simply provide some helpful context for understanding our society today and how to navigate through it in a faithfully Christian manner. I’m calling my little project “The Seven Deadly Spins” in order to refer to spins—or distortions—of what is true.
The idea I’ll mention today is called nominalism. It is the claim that an idea like “human nature” or “humanity” does not come into our minds from the world around us; rather, that idea is just a title or category that we assign to a group of similar but ultimately separate things. For example, when you go downtown to the cafĂ©, you don’t shake hands with “human nature”—you shake hands with Bob, Steve, Debbie, and Sue. Yet from ancient times, philosophers argued that there was something real that connected Bob, Steve, Debbie, and Sue—something they all shared in common that we could call human nature. These philosophers argued further that this shared thing was not just an invention of our minds, it was something our minds discovered about the real world, and this shared thing was just as real as anything we can see, touch, taste, smell, or hear. Beginning in the Middle Ages however, it started to become more fashionable among philosophers to deny that something like “human nature” existed as anything more than just an idea that our minds created to categorize things around us.
That far-too-brief description is surely still a bit confusing to you, but the significance of nominalism is this—if an idea like human nature is just the product of human minds, then human minds control it. We would get to decide what the boundaries of human nature are and who fits inside those boundaries. Perhaps you can see where this could lead. Combined with another idea or two, nominalism becomes the root of racism—the claim that we can declare other people to be “sub-human” simply because of where we choose to draw the boundaries of humanity. In a similar way, nominalism becomes the root of denying personhood to a baby in the womb—because again, if nominalism is true, human minds become the arbiter of who does and who does not count as a person.
In contrast to nominalism, Christians ought to affirm that a thing like human nature is a real, true, objective feature of the universe. It’s not something we made up and thus it’s not something we control. My shared humanity with another person is a fact imposed upon both of us—I don’t get to decide if humanity applies to him any more than I get to decide if the laws of physics apply to him! And what could make reality be this way? Only our Creator God who conceived of humanity in His mind in the first place.
Wednesday, April 5, 2023
It's True--Jesus Rose from the Grave
As you read this column today, we find ourselves in the middle of Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter Sunday when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Most of you reading this article have grown up in Christianity, so the claim that Jesus came back to life on the third day after he died is second-nature to you; it is old hat; it is so common that it has likely become mundane and ordinary—which is sad, ironic, and spiritually dangerous all at the same time.
2.
Jesus’ disciples sincerely believed that Jesus came back to life and visited
them
3.
James, the biological half-brother of Jesus, suddenly converted to faith in
Jesus after Jesus had died
4.
Saul of Tarsus suddenly converted to faith in Jesus after Jesus had died
Wednesday, June 22, 2022
Reading Recommendations--2022 Edition
For Children
My
recommendation here is quite simple—the Book of Proverbs. I plan to read
through it this summer with my kids and I think that would be a good program
for all families. Did you know that Proverbs was compiled with young people in
mind? Youth is a great time to soak up the wisdom in that book. There are a
couple of spicy passages about sexuality in the first nine chapters, so you may
want to skip over those sections depending on the age of your children.
Fiction
My
list shows me that I apparently need to get some more fiction titles on my
reading list, but here are two that I can recommend to you:
The
Genius Plague, by David Walton. This page-turner tells the tale of a
viral fungus that gives people increased brain power. I know—it sounds weird,
but it makes for a great story!
The
Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I recently heard a “classic”
described as a book that’s bound to be boring, but this classic is anything
but. Be prepared—this is not a short book. I actually read this one 20 years
ago and it took me an entire summer. But the payoff is worth it as this story
leads you to consider the battle of good versus evil and how that battle plays
out in every human heart.
Non-Fiction
I
tend to be drawn toward war stories since they naturally make for high drama.
Wars also tend to be significant turning points in history, so reading about
them often helps us understand the present day. Most war stories tend to have
bad language that I cannot condone, but I do tolerate it in a book for the sake
of learning more about history. Two good war stories I’ve read recently are The
Last Stand of Fox Company, by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin about a conflict in
the Korean War, and Last Men Out, by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin about the
last Americans in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. Another good book in
this category would be Sea Stories, by William H. McRaven, the
recently-retired commander of the Navy’s SEAL teams.
One
period of history I’d never learned much about was the fight for independence
in Texas, so I filled in some of that gap in my knowledge by reading Sam
Houston and the Alamo Avengers, by Brian Kilmeade.
If
you ever feel like the Bible gets misquoted and misused in present-day debates,
you should know that this is not a new phenomenon. For some helpful historical
context, read A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood, by James P. Byrd to see
how the Bible was used by both abolitionists and slaveowners during the Civil
War.
Christian
Living
I’m
a late-comer to this book since it’s been out for many years, but if you want
to be encouraged by God’s kind faithfulness in the midst of dark times, you’ve
got to read The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom. A book with a similar
focus on God’s help in times of need is The Sacred Acre, by Mark Tabb,
the true story of a high school football coach in Iowa and the impact of his
faith on his whole community.
We
all have opportunities to help people who are dealing with grief, and we’d all
be better at doing that if we’d read What Grieving People Wish You Knew
about What Really Helps (and What Really Hurts), by Nancy Guthrie.
The
Apostles’ Creed, by R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is a good book for learning some
basic theology through an ancient summary of Christian faith while also seeing
how some of those ideas have come under attack in the present time.
Heavy
Lifting
In
this category for this year I will recommend Simply Trinity, by Matthew
Barrett. This book takes a close look at the doctrine of the Trinity, focusing
on how this doctrine was understood in ancient times versus how it is often
presented today. Any time you discuss the Trinity, things get deep quickly and
that’s true of this book as well, yet it remains fairly readable for a general
audience.