How God Turns a French Atheist into a Christian Theologian

Amazing story of conversion here.

Doesn't Science Disprove Christianity?

Books by Michael Horton:

• The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way
• Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church
• Putting Amazing Back into Grace: Embracing the Heart of the Gospel
• For Calvinism
• The Gospel-Driven Life: Being Good News People in a Bad News World
• A Better Way: Rediscovering the Drama of God-Centered Worship
• The Law of Perfect Freedom

Science is Neat

This is fun and interesting all at the same time.  I still don't get it but I like it!

Why You Can't Dismiss a Line of Reasoning Simply Because It's Religious

Helpful deconstruction of this common misconception by philosopher and apologist, Greg Koukl.


I would recommend his books:

• Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions
• Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air
• Faith Is Not Wishing: 13 Essays for Christian Thinkers

Satan Possesses a Chemistry Teacher

No, this is not a post about Breaking Bad. It's real life fun with science! This is what happens when you inhale sulfur hexaflouride.

Renowned Scientist Tenderly Explains His Faith

Books by Dr. Collins can be found here.

De-Extinction? Playing God?

Interesting link here that could lead to some very interesting theological and ethical questions bought about by the science community.

The Science of Porn Addiction

"Scientific claims about ultimate reality are driven by deeper worldview assumptions"

Important thoughts here from Michael Horton:

Scientists disagree about all sorts of things: from matters as metaphysical as string theory to details over genetic mutation. In fact, as Michael Polanyi argued years ago, scientists belong to a concrete, historical community of interpretation. They too have lives, histories, and experiences within which they interpret reality.

We all remember the ill-fated pronouncements of the church in relation to Copernicus and Galileo, but it was scientists who made the biggest fuss at least initially over the new cosmology. Not unlike religious communities, the scientific community resists massive paradigm shifts. That’s good, because we’d be starting over every day if it were otherwise. It takes a lot of anomalies to overthrow a well-established paradigm. But it happens.

Of course, one reason that paradigm revolutions can occur is that there are rigorous standards for evaluating and testing theories. I would argue that this is what sets Christianity apart from other religions. It arose not out of a projection of felt needs, the charisma of a sage, or the profundity of its universal ideas, but as a historical claim with cosmic significance: the resurrection of Jesus. It was a paradigm revolution within the Jewish community that sparked momentous debate. Even greater was the shift that it provoked when it met the Greek world. The idea of God as personal—and three persons to boot; that the world is created out of nothing, as a free act by a good God, not to mention the incarnation of this God in history and his death and resurrection as redemption-bringing events, were completely revolutionary. One couldn’t really be a good Platonist by day and a Christian by night. A choice had to be made.

Even within religious communities there are major paradigm shifts. The Reformation is an example. Fresh exegesis turned up new evidence and shed new light on passages that had been misunderstood—even mistranslated in the Latin Vulgate. This doesn’t explain it all, of course, but it was a big part of it. The reformers didn’t set out to cause a revolution. They didn’t touch most of the Christian doctrines—affirming the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and other key teachings without alteration. However, they did cause many throughout Europe to rethink the meaning of the gospel. Pretty significant on its own merits.

At some point, we have to take responsibility. We can’t just dismiss the search with Pilate’s shrug, “What is truth?”

At a conference a number of years ago, I was on a panel with Bill Nye (as in “The Science Guy”). Like a modern-day David Hume, he made general arguments about religious claims as equivalent to fairy tales that evolve over time with each telling. I agreed with some of his assertions about religion in general, but asked him to evaluate specific claims for Christ’s resurrection. Going through these claims, one by one, he became increasingly impatient. Finally, without addressing even one of the arguments, he dismissed the whole thing with a single brush, returning to his opening assertions.

Christianity has been in the business of offering arguments and evidence from the beginning. The Hebrew prophets mock the idols of the nations because they cannot speak and cannot make good on their promises in history. The God of Israel has done so in Jesus Christ and “has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31).

Of course, none of us is neutral. We all come to the evidence with big assumptions about reality. The Holy Spirit alone can bring conversion, but he does so through his Word. And he also uses supporting arguments and evidence that reveal too many devastating anomalies—indeed contradictions—that our reigning worldview can’t accommodate. One thing is for certain: to say that miracles do not happen because they cannot happen is as vicious a circle as any argument can be. In fact, it’s not an argument at all, but mere assertion. Isaac Asimov said, “Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don’t have the evidence to prove that God doesn’t exist, but I so strongly suspect that he doesn’t that I don’t want to waste my time.” Insert “believer” and change “doesn’t exist” to “does exist” and there is nothing expressed here that the Dawkinses of the world wouldn’t leap upon as evidence of blind faith.

Hoyle concludes, seemingly against his personal inclinations, that the evidence requires a transcendent creator, while Dawkins’ conclusion couldn’t be more antithetical. No less than religious ones, scientific claims about ultimate reality are driven by deeper worldview assumptions. But the sheer fact that there are competing claims doesn’t settle anything. Whether or not we take the time to investigate those claims on their own terms is a decision that closed minds on both sides of the debate will have to consider seriously if the search for truth is of any significance to being human.

Read the rest.

Books by Michael Horton:

• The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way
• Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church
• Putting Amazing Back into Grace: Embracing the Heart of the Gospel
• For Calvinism
• The Gospel-Driven Life: Being Good News People in a Bad News World
• A Better Way: Rediscovering the Drama of God-Centered Worship
• The Law of Perfect Freedom

Deconstructing Dawkins

Francis Beckwith:

Soon after Benedict announced his abdication, the eminent science writer and Oxford professor, Richard Dawkins, sent out this tweet: “I feel sorry for the Pope and all old Catholic priests. Imagine having a wasted life to look back on and no sex.”

If you know anything about Dawkins, you know that he is the quintessential scientific rationalist, denying that anything that cannot be captured and quantified under the categories of the hard sciences, or traceable to them, is outside the purview of reason – and that anything outside that purview is de facto irrational. For this reason, Dawkins, as the pope would put it, has an aversion to asking questions that cannot be subsumed under the rubric of scientific rationalism.

So let us explore the reason that dare not speak its name. Dawkins, as is well known, maintains that reason – understood as equivalent to scientific rationalism, which has established the truth of evolutionary theory – requires that we deny that nature is designed, and thus is not infused with intrinsic purposes or proper ends by which we can issue moral judgments.

Setting aside his ungrounded belief that evolution per se is inconsistent with intrinsic purposes and proper ends in nature, it should be clear that Dawkins’ scientific rationalism means that his anti-papal tweet cannot be a deliverance of reason.

After all, for one to claim that a life of priestly celibacy devoted to Christ and his Church is a wasted life requires that one know what a fulfilled life would look like. But such a life is an ideal, and thus is not like an empirical claim about the natural world. It is not an object of scientific inquiry. One cannot point to it, as one would point toward Pope Benedict or Richard Dawkins, though the intellect can be aware of this abstract truth when assessing Benedict and Dawkins by it.

Just as we know that a blind person ought to have sight because we know what a human being is by nature and how his parts and properties are ordered toward certain ends that work in concert for the good of the whole, we also know what excellence and virtue are before and after we see them actualized in our fellows.

But given his diminished understanding of reason, Dawkins must deny that even he can issue such judgments by means of his rational powers. Consequently, on Dawkins’ own account of reason, his verdict on the pope’s life is the cerebral equivalent of covert flatulence gone terribly wrong: not silent and not deadly.

Is This Really a Debate About Bible vs. Science?

Click on image to see larger.  

Alan Schlemon interacts with this graphic above in a helpful way.  

The 20 Most-Watched TED Talks to Date

TED:

TED is dedicated to ideas worth spreading. And that leaves many wondering exactly which ideas have been spread the most widely in the six years that TEDTalks videos have been available online. Here, a list of the 20 most-watched talks on all the platforms we track: TED.com, YouTube, iTunes, embed and download, Hulu and more.

From education to brain function to inspiring messages to techno-possibilities, this list represents quite a breadth of topics.

1. Sir Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity (2006): 13,409,417 views
2. Jill Bolte Taylor‘s stroke of insight (2008): 10,409,851
3. Pranav Mistry on the thrilling potential of SixthSense (2009): 9,223,263
4. David Gallo‘s underwater astonishments (2007): 7,879,541
5. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense (2009): 7,467,580
6. Tony Robbins asks Why we do what we do (2006): 6,879,488
7. Simon Sinek on how great leaders inspire action (2010): 6,050,294
8. Steve Jobs on how to live before you die (2005): 5,444,022
9. Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen (2006): 4,966,643
10. Brene Brown talks about the power of vulnerability (2010): 4,763,038
11. Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation (2009): 4,706,241
12. Arthur Benjamin does mathemagic (2005): 4,658,425
13. Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing your genius (2009): 4,538,037
14. Dan Gilbert asks: Why are we happy? (2004): 4,269,082
15. Stephen Hawking asks big questions about the universe (2008): 4,153,105
16. Jeff Han demos his breakthrough multi-touchscreen (2006): 3,891,251
17. Johnny Lee shows Wii Remote hacks for educators (2008): 3,869,417
18. Keith Barry does brain magic (2004): 3,847,893
19. Mary Roach 10 things you didn’t know about orgasm (2009): 3,810,630
20. Vijay Kumar demos robots that fly like birds (2012): 3,535,340

Compare and contrast how the 2012 list of the most popular talks stacks up to the 2011 list, written on the fifth birthday of TEDTalks videos.

(HT:  Nathan Bingham)