Defending the Faith

Over at The White Horse Inn Michael Horton continues his helpful video series on answering challenges to the faith.

Why Is There So Much Evil in the World?

How Can Anyone Know About Life After Death?

Defending the Faith

Reza Aslan - Giving History a Bad Name

John Dickson is an Australian pastor, historian, and evangelist. Denny Burk has called Dickson's review of Reza Aslan's book on Jesus "the most devastating" he has read. After reading it myself, I must agree. In fact, if you read only one review of Aslan's best-seller, Dickson is the one to read. Incidentally, Dr. Dickson is a fabulous preacher and apologist. His books are worth reading and the programs he has produced for Australian TV are outstanding.

Check out his review HERE.

"The most disappointing thing about the fanfare accorded to a book like Zealot is not that it will undermine the Christian faith (it will not); even less that it poses a challenge to the consensus of working scholars (it certainly does not). It is that it chips away at the public's confidence in history per se.

"For a brief moment, Reza Aslan will be heralded as a breakthrough author. In a month or so, some other theory, equally unsubstantiated and certainly contradictory, will get the same kind of airtime. Such works are generally ignored by working scholars, who tend to be suspicious of anything that bypasses the peer review process.

"The general public, however, over time experiences breakthrough fatigue - an increasing contempt coupled with a decreasing curiosity toward any new claim about the man from Nazareth. The net effect is a weary scepticism that we can know anything about the historical Jesus or about history at all.

"The Jesus depicted in Zealot is certainly a figment of the imagination of a professor of creative writing, but he is likely to do concrete damage to the public's appreciation of a vast and worthwhile academic discipline. Aslan's Jesus is giving history a bad name."
- John Dickson

What is Covenantal Apologetics?

Dr. Scott Oliphint on Covenantal Apologetics and his new book by that title:



I was honored to have Dr. Oliphint preach for me twice this year. I would encourage you to check out his two excellent sermons HERE.

Contending For the Faith

I have been preaching a short series of sermons through Jude. One sermon, covering verses 3 and 4 focuses on Jude's call to "contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints." The White Horse Inn recently posted some helpful links on this very theme. Check it out HERE.

Good Apologetics Sites

Check out these sites which provide good resources and articles on Christian apologetics:

• Choosing Hats
• John Lennox
• Centre For Public Christianity (John Dickson)
• Discovery Institute
• Fixed Point Foundation
• The Ehrman Project
• Canon Fodder (Michael Kruger)

Borrowed Logic

In 1985 Christian philosopher Greg Bahnsen debated atheist Gordon Stein. It has since become known as The Great Debate. Dr. Stein was caught flatfooted as Dr. Bahnsen, rather than defending traditional arguments for the existence of God, effectively demonstrated that Stein's appeal to logic, science, and morality presuppose a Christian worldview. It is a brilliant display of Presuppositional Apologetics.

Take time to the listen to (or read) the debate that the atheists would rather forget.

AUDIO

Transcript in PDF

Resources on Presuppositional Apologetics:

The Great Debate (CD/DVD) - Bahnsen & Stein

Presuppositional Apologetics by Greg Bahnsen

Always Ready by Greg Bahnsen

Apologetics for the Glory of God by John Frame

Every Thought Captive by Richard Pratt

HT: The Resurgence

The Best of Apologetics

I continue to be concerned by the number of Christians I meet who seem unable to offer a defense of the faith.

The following books are outstanding resources to help equip Christians wanting to know why they believe and offer those reasons to others.

Defending the Faith:

Every Thought Captive by Richard Pratt

Apologetics to the Glory of God by John Frame

Presuppositional Apologetics by Greg Bahnsen

Always Ready by Greg Bahnsen

The Battle Belongs to the Lord by K. Scott Oliphint

Science & Philosophy:

Who Made God? by Edgar Andrews

The Reason for God by Tim Keller

God's Undertaker by John Lennox

God and Stephen Hawking by John Lennox

The Dawkins Letters by David Robertson

God Is: How Christianity Explains Everything by Doug Wilson

The Devil's Delusion by David Berlinski

Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyer

Should Christians Embrace Evolution? ed. by Norman Nevin

DVD's:

Science and Faith: Friends or Foes?

Does God Exist?

The Reason for God by Tim Keller

The Christ Files: A Search for the Real Jesus by John Dickson

Life of Jesus by John Dickson

Websites:

The Discovery Institute

Centre for Public Christianity

Simple Apologetics

Ehrman Project

John Dickson

The Christ Files

NEXT Audio

The audio from the Next Conference is now available.

God on the World: The Bible’s Framework for a Christian Worldview
Jeff Purswell

Think or Believe? The Role of Reason in the Life of Faith
Scott Oliphint

The Gospel and the Postmodern Mind
D.A. Carson

The Reality of Truth in a World of Relativism
R.C. Sproul

Who am I? Humanity in the Eyes of the World and the Christian
Kevin DeYoung

Where does good come from?

Take time to check out the debate between Christian philosopher William Lane Craig and atheist Sam Harris. The debate is centered on whether or not an atheist has a reasonable foundation for morality.

One is almost embarrassed for Sam Harris. Dr. Craig dismantles him. Harris provides no support for his contention that morality makes sense in a universe without God. All he can do is attack Christianity. It is the same error that Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins make. It's just that Dawkins and Hitchens sound more eloquent.

Does the Universe Need God?

In his newest book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking finally clears up all the confusion over the existence of God. Well, actually his program is not quite so grand. Hawking concludes that the universe simply does not need God. But what Hawking proves in The Grand Design is that some scientists make poor philosophers. Richard Dawkins proved this embarrassingly so in The God Delusion.

Frank Tipler of Tulane University suggests that Hawking has actually proven the existence of God.

In 1966, Stephen Hawking published his first — completely valid — proof for the existence of God. Over the next seven years, he followed this with even more powerful valid theorems proving God’s existence.

So how did Hawking, who successfully proved God’s existence, remain an atheist? Simple. He simply denied that the assumptions he used in his proofs were true. As a matter of logic, if the assumptions in a proof are not true, then the conclusions need not be true. What assumptions did the young Hawking make? He assumed that the laws of physics, mainly Einstein’s theory of gravity, were true. In the summary of his early research, namely his book The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, Hawking wrote:

It seems to be a good principle that the prediction of [God] by a physical theory indicates that the theory has broken down, i.e. it no longer provides a correct description of observations.

Hawking then began working on quantum gravity, in hopes that God would be at last eliminated from the equations. Alas, it was not to be: God was even more prominent — and unavoidable — in quantum gravity than in Einstein’s theory of gravity. In his latest book, The Grand Design, Hawking has pinned his hope of eliminating God on M-theory, a theory with no experimental support whatsoever, hence not a theory of physics at all. Nor has it been proven that M-theory is mathematically consistent. Nor has it been proven that God has been eliminated from M-theory. There are disquieting signs (for Hawking and company) that He is also unavoidable in M-theory, as He is in Einstein’s gravity, and in quantum gravity.

In spite of what the atheist press is telling you, it’s looking bad for atheism today. And it is extraordinary the lengths an atheist like Hawking will go to avoid the obvious: God exists.

The alert reader will have noticed that in the above quote, Hawking did not actually use the word “God.” But this is what he really meant. To see this, let us recall just what the word “God” means.

Consider the opening words of the (original) Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God, the omnipotent Father, Maker of all things visible and invisible.” These words give the basic definition of “God” used by Christians and Jews: God is the Cause of everything, but He Himself has no cause. God is the Uncaused First Cause. In his Second Way, Thomas Aquinas proves the existence of the Uncaused First (efficient)Cause, and Aquinas concludes, “to which all give the name ‘God’ (quam omnes Deum nominant).”

So now let us return to the theorems of the young Hawking. By following the history of the universe back into time — in other words, by following the causes of the current universe back into time — Hawking proved that all of these causes had a common cause; a common cause that did not itself have a cause. This common cause was an Uncaused Cause that was beyond the control of the laws of physics, beyond the control of any possible laws of physics. Rather, the entire universe began at this Uncaused First Cause.

In exactly the same way that Aquinas used the word “create,” we can say that the Uncaused First Cause, whose existence was proven decades ago by Hawking, “created” the universe.

Hawking called this Uncaused First Cause a “singularity.”

But given the properties of this “singularity,” it is God. So I have replaced the word “singularity,” which Hawking actually used in the above quote, with what it really means according to Aquinas.

Read the rest HERE.

God's Knowing and Man's Knowing

In reading posts at Biologos I have been struck by the biblical scholars who seem to suggest that their apprehension of truth is of higher authority than what is revealed in God's Word. In other words, when something in the Bible does not comport with their intellectual or sentemental categories they simply dismiss it as error, myth, or even immoral.

Cornelius Van Til built an apologetic around the notion of antithesis - the idea that there is a God-imposed and therefore fixed conflict between the people of God and the unregenerate (Gen 3:15). This antithesis extends to every realm of being, including the intellectual. Therefore the unregenerate mind while able to grasp facts cannot fully integrate those facts or understand their ultimate meaning. This is the clear teaching of Scripture. The unregenerate cannot and will not accept the things of God for they are spiritually discerned (Isa. 44:18; 1 Cor. 2:14). What is more, he will always take the facts that he can know and twist them into a justification for his idolatry (Romans 1).

It seems to me that the biblical scholars writing for Biologos are demanding that the Bible be subject to unregenerate and unbelieving standards of epistemology. As a result whatever portions of the Bible which do not yield to these unbelieving standards must be dismissed. This agenda is not even veiled. It is stated by at least one of these scholars that they will only believe those portions of the Bible which are intellectually satisfying. It is quite breathtaking.

Van Til addresses the issue quite powerfully:

As God has self-contained being and all other being has created or derivative being, so also God has self-contained and man has derivative knowledge. In contrast with this all forms of non-Christian epistemology speak first of knowledge in general and introduce the distinction between divine and human knowledge afterwards. It is true that there are forms of non-Christian epistemology that speak of the divine knowledge as though it were wholly other, qualitatively different, from human knowledge. So there are also forms of non-Christian metaphysics that speak of God's being as wholly other, as qualitatively different, from man's being. This is notably the case with the Theology of Crisis, [neo-Orthodoxy, Karl Barth, etc.] informed as it is by a skeptical theory of knowledge. But when this God, whose being and knowledge is said to be who wholly different from the being and knowledge of man is, as he must be, brought into contact with the being and knowledge of man, there follows a fusion of the two. Either God's being and knowledge are brought down to the level of the being and knowledge of man or the being and knowledge of man are lifted up to the being and knowledge of God. There is always the same monistic assumption at work reducing all distinctions to correlatives of one another...

Hence man's dealings in the realm of truth are not ultimately with God but with an abstraction that stands above God, with Truth as such. For apologetics it means that the basic principle of the non-Christian conception of truth cannot be challenged. According to this most basic assumption it is man rather than God that is the final reference point in all predication...

A moment's reflection upon the fall of man in paradise will prove this to be true. In paradise God said to man that if he ate of the forbidden fruit he would surely die. The truth about the facts in the created universe, Adam and Eve were told in effect, could be known ultimately only if one knew their relationship to the plan of God...God did not, because he could not, look up to an abstract principle of Truth above himself in order, in accordance with it, to fashion the world.

- Christian Apologetics, pp. 31-33

It is profoundly significant that Biologos and their biblical scholars deny the historicity of Adam and Eve and the fall. Indeed, this fact alone says MUCH about their basic assumptions about the capacity for the unregenerate and unbelieving mind to subject to its own standards the revelation of God.

Setting apart Christ as Lord in our defense of the faith

"Where Peter commands us always to be ready to set forth a defense of the hope in us, he also specifies the condition under which this must done: 'Set Christ apart as Lord in your hearts' (1 Peter 3:15). In all our apologetical endeavors we must honor Christ as Lord over our thinking and argumentation. He alone must occupy this unique position of lordship in our minds, for He must be 'set apart' for that function. That which dictates what we think and present in defense of the faith must not be the theories, inferences, and assumptions of secular learning. The content and logic of our apologetic comes from the Word of Christ our Lord...

"Exclusive loyalty belongs to the Lord, and hence His Word must never be doubted or tried. Consequently, when Peter commands us to defend the faith by honoring the lordship of Christ, this means that we must never assume an uncommitted or neutral stance with respect to the veracity of God's Word. Scripture is not on trial, but must always be presupposed as true. To presume to work up to a recognition of its truth by independent argumentation would be to honor some other lord than Christ (whether it be empirical discovery, logic, some scholar's opinion, one's own rational abilities, or whatever). Christ alone must govern our thoughts, and His Word must not be brought into question. In setting forth our reasoned account for the Christian hope in us we are obligated by the word of our Lord to do so without casting doubt upon Scripture's veracity. The Lord's word must be presupposed and obeyed in everything we do--even apologetics. Like faithful Abraham, we must never waver in unbelief (Rom. 4:20). The Word of God should not be treated as a hypothesis to be proved by rational-emperical testing; it must never be reduced to the level of probability. It is the unquestionable Word of Christ our Lord; we begin with its veracity and argue accordingly. It is the thinking of the rebel sinner, not the Word of the Lord, that must be brought into question. Our defense of the faith does not work toward an honoring of Christ's lordship; it works under that lordship!"

- Greg Bahnsen from Presuppositional Apologetics (pp. 26-27)

The final two sentences devestate me: "It is the thinking of the rebel sinner, not the Word of the Lord, that must be brought into question. Our defense of the faith does not work toward an honoring of Christ's lordship; it works under that lordship!"

It saddens me to think about the biblical scholars who, in the classroom and their books, attack the veracity of God's own Word. It's remarkable really. As one Old Testament scholar said to me, "There is not a single page of the Bible that does not bear the taint of human error." His own presuppositions and conclusions have taken on a greater level authority than the Word of God. This is idolatry and rebel thinking.

It should be no surprise then when Christian students, attending "Christian" colleges, reared to believe the Bible as God's Word end up departing from the faith after one or two classes with such unbelieving Bible teachers.

The Myth of Neutrality

The late (d. 1995) great Greg Bahnsen. Dr. Bahnsen may well have been the greatest apologist of our generation.


Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Christ-Centered Apologetics

From Lane Tipton...

Who Made God?

Tim Challies has given an enthusiastic recommendation to Who Made God? by scholar Edgar Andrews.

Why should the Devil get all the good scientists? It sometimes seems that way, doesn’t it? We hear of scientists like Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins and others who are acclaimed as being at the top of their field and almost inevitably it seems that they are atheists or otherwise committed to explaining the world in terms of Darwinian evolution. Occasionally we find a great dissenting mind, but then we discover that that person is committed to beliefs that seem opposed to the plain account of Scripture. So we have Francis Collins who writes The Language of God but who in the book says that, though God exists, life and creation can be explained in terms of natural laws and processes that do not depend on the Divine hand of God. It is both tiresome and frustrating.

But here at last comes Edgar Andrews whose list of academic credentials include more letters than all the names in my family: BSc, PhD, DSc, FInstP, FIMMM, CEng, CPhys (which, according to a site I consulted, is together an anagram for disbenching tscpf fpsps chym- cmd ‘m). No, I don’t know what any of those degrees mean, but they sure sound impressive. He is Emeritus Professor of Materials at the University of London and an international expert on the science of large molecules (not small ones, mind you, only the large ones). His credentials include things that sound like they must set him apart; things such as this: In September 1972 he was one of four specially invited speakers at the dedication symposium of the Michigan Molecular Institute, two of the others being Nobel Laureates Paul Flory and Melvin Calvin.

Put it all together and you find that Andrews is one smart dude. He’s smarter than you and me and the rest of us put together. And in his new book Who Made God? he launches a full front assault on the new atheists. He does this not through a point-by-point refutation of their books, but by an insightful look at science and the existence of God. An excellent writer who mixes a subtle British sense of humor with a powerful intellect and a deep understanding of science, he very quickly picks apart the arguments we have for so long been hearing from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking and even Francis Collins. Yet he still crafts a book that is readable and, best of all, understandable. Even the chapter dealing with string theory is comprehensible—no small feat for a smart guy writing about what lies at the very frontier of science.

Read the entire review HERE.

Scott Oliphint on Apologetics and Scripture

"Why is Christianity True?"

The latest edition of The White Horse Inn deals with the question "Why is Christianity true?" Listen to it HERE.

Basics Conference (2)

The opening day of Basics has been terrific. One of the things I love about this conference is that it is not overwhelmingly large. It usually runs about 600 pastors. I don't have to navigate a downtown maze or pay for parking. It's not held in a large convention center but in a church. It is truly a time to refresh. This year is a bit different because there are 1,500 pastors present. That's what happens when John Piper is one of the speakers.

Piper's first session was excellent. More on that later.

The keynote speaker is a man named John Lennox. I have never heard of Lennox before. He is a brillant appologist. He teaches mathematics at the University of Oxford and is a Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at Green College. He lectures around the world. He is particularly interested in the intersection of science, philosophy, and theology. His opening address was warm and pastoral. Although a respected intellectual Dr. Lennox communicates humbly and passionately. He has held public debates with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The DVD's of those debates (4 in all) are available for purchase.

Check out these resources from John Lennox:
God's Undertaker
Christianity: Opium or Truth?
Debates with Hitchens & Dawkins

Hitchens and Wilson: The God Debate

Check out this debate between atheist Christopher Hitchens and Christian apologist Douglas Wilson held at Westminster Theological Seminary.