May 1st 2008
I gave this talk at Seaford Baptist Church on Wednesday, April 23, 2008. Some portions have been edited out because they’re not applicable to a wider audience.
Option-Click (Mac) or Right-Click (Mac or PC) to Download mp3, or listen directly online:
April 3rd 2008
More positive life outcomes associated with spirituality. This EurekAlert article’s headline reads
Religion, other factors contribute to successful African-American marriages
Spousal commitment, faith and communication key to enduring relationships
This continues to add to an ongoing store of articles on spirituality and life outcomes. Please see that page for perspectives on interpreting such research.
March 31st 2008
Richard Dawkins is famously trying to convince the world that it’s abusive to raise children in a religious tradition–any religious tradition. It’s an ironically unscientific opinion, not just unsupported but actually contradicted by research. Mike Gene points to yet another instance of that:
Spirituality — defined as an inner belief system — accounted for eight to 17 per cent of the average child’s sense of happiness, the study showed.
By contrast, money, the marital status of parents and the child’s gender didn’t even register one per cent.
“It’s a whopping big effect…”
[From Calgary Herald, Finding out what makes kids happy]
This adds to an ongoing store of articles on spirituality and life outcomes. Please see that page for perspectives on interpreting such research.
March 27th 2008
Albert Mohler on Is Belief in God Just a Natural Phenomenon?
Barry Carey on Jesus Without the New Testament
Rather technical but helpful for those who do this kind of thing: State of the Debate: Rowe, Wykstra, and Plantinga on the Evidential Argument From Evil (Hat Tip to Johnny-Dee)
March 21st 2008
The responses to my question last week include the following.
From SteveK:
I’d say a religion that confirmed, or aligned with, what we are most striving for…. What has humanity been striving for throughout history? At the top of the list: love, truth, joy, contentment, justice, peace, understanding, relationship, significance, hope, etc.
Leslie explained that followers’ devotion is not a true test of a religion, then added,
Personally, the historical authenticity and reliability of the religion’s writings seems to me to be one of the few ways to take an unbiased look at the validity of what the religion teaches. I’m not sure it’s the whole test, but for me it’s definitely part of it.
Paul wrote:
I’d need to be able to communicate with the God of the religion in a normal fashion. I’d need a being that I could communicate with directly, as easily as I do my friends.
doctor(logic)’s answer seemed to be that there is no test. Does that imply there’s no way to know what is not a true religion?
Medicine Man said he believes a true religion must display internal consistency of its beliefs and ideas. Then he linked to a page on his blog where he adds these tests:
He expands these five items with commentary there.
wf3 offered a surprising suggestion:
Since truth, by necessity, excludes error, I would look for a religion that claims to be the sole truth.
Fabio picked up an earlier theme on the adherents to a religion and suggested,
at if you want to judge a religion by its adherents you would not measure the adherents by some set bar, but rather you would measure each adherent by the changes, positive or negative, in that person.
This follow-on was amusing:
Obviously that’s difficult to do and subject to interpretation (would a relativist agree that a liar who became honest is a better man?).
Further, he added,
this religion should not contradict scientific fact…. [and] he religion should account for the origin of the entire universe, not just earth or mankind, and the religions god should be external to the universe. If a religion claims that its god is part of and contained in the universe, then it can hardly be true.
Havok pointed to the internal consistency test that was raised more than once, and suggested that those commenters were holding to an internal coherence theory of truth. That’s not necessarily the case. Internal coherence theories typically say that a system of beliefs is true just if it is internally coherent. Internal coherence is the sole test. We saw among these comments, though, that there ought also to be a correspondence with reality. Correspondence theories include coherence as one test, but not the only test of truth.
Since I’ve already moved from recapitulating into analyzing, I’ll continue. No one pretended these comments would make an exhaustive list of tests, but there are some good ones here. wf3’s is the most unexpected: A religion that claims to be the sole truth. I think this is on the right track. If religions disagree with each other, and one of them is true, then the others must be false (where they disagree with it). Moreover it seems that the one true religion quite plausibly would have the self-awareness to know that its truth excludes all conflicting truth claims.
In The Reason for God, which I’ll be reviewing soon, Timothy Keller makes an interesting related point. If there is one true religion, then your culture and mine, as well as all other cultures, are going to think it’s wrong on some significant point. Why? Because ultimate spiritual reality is not culturally conditioned. Every religion teaches that humans have a problem with knowing or doing the truth. A problem like this is bound to appear in cultures as well as individuals. Every culture will have a problem with knowing or doing the truth.
Because of cultural conditioning, though, we are likely to see it the other way around. We tend to think of our cultures as having “arrived,” but this, too is culturally conditioned. Westerners typically think it’s illiberal and unethical, for example, to judge another culture, but other cultures disagree with that. Are we going to judge them and say they are wrong? That’s contradictory and can even become comical. Mark Steyn wrote of Lady Kennedy’s apparent belief that
our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable.
Paul’s test, to be able to communicate with God as a friend, raises all kinds of interesting thoughts. I’ll outline a much-too-short Christian response. First, God calls us into a very personal relationship with Him, where there is true communication. Second, it cannot be as a friend to a friend, because God is God and we are not (nor are our friends). God is worthy of worship, not casual hanging out together. Third, human rebellion from God creates a barrier which God overcomes in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross (it’s Good Friday today, when we commemorate that). Real relationship is possible for those who enter it on God’s terms, but not for those who refuse the terms for which He lovingly gave His life. And the real relationship we can experience now is nothing compared to the intimacy we’ll experience in heaven with God.
To summarize, we have several tests on the table here:
That’s not a bad list. We can work with it.
March 14th 2008
Commenter Havok has been asking for evidences that could convince him that Christianity is true. He has been asking for the answer to one type of question in particular, as here:
But there are many different Gods experienced. Some claim Yahweh, others Jesus, others Allah, others Ganesh etc. With all of these conflicting experiences, how can you trust that any one experience is accurate? To me, they all seem to be based on the same evidence, that is personal testimony of an internal revelation.
Given that there are many different religions, how can we have confidence that one of them is true? That’s a big question, and I’m relaxing on a Friday evening, I’m going to ask you for help with it. If you’re willing to do this with me, we’re going to define the question more clearly. I’d like your answers to this:
Assume for the sake of discussion that there is one true religion, that it can be known to be true, and that its truth means that contrary beliefs are false. How could its truth be known? What might be some indicators of its being more trustworthy and reliable than other beliefs?
I’m not asking for answers in the form “here is the test and this is why Christianity passes,” or conversely “this is why Christianity fails.” I’m just asking for the first part of it: what would you consider to be the kind of thing that might indicate the truth of a religion? If you want to tell us you think Christianity does or does not measure up to your test, that’s fine, but you need not go into how it succeeds or falls short. We’ll come back to that very soon. For now, I’d be interested just to know what readers think would constitute a useful truth test for a religion.
Please think in terms of real-world tests. I’m not asking for signs like, “If God wrote Jesus’ name on every brick in the world, then I’d know.” Even those of you who are skeptics or atheists might be able to think of tests like that. You could think about how you might fill in X here: “If I were to find out that X, then I might believe that Y was the one true religion.”
I hope this is clear. Thanks for participating!
February 25th 2008
In his new book, The Reason for God, currently No. 18 on the New York Times bestseller list, Keller offers what one might call his summa: the meat of his preaching, teaching, and confession of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior for a world of unexamined materialist presuppositions, genetic determinisms, and endless digital cross-chatter.
I [Anthony Sacramone] sat down to talk with Pastor Keller at the Redeemer offices in Manhattan….
[From FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » An Interview with Timothy Keller]
February 9th 2008
My guest column in the Newport News Daily Press appeared again today, under the headline “God answers it all.” It’s on Charles Colson’s provocative assertion that “Christianity is the explanation for everything.”
(The above link will disappear in 1-2 weeks, after which you may still access the article in PDF form here.)
Because of limited space, I could not address all the questions I knew my article would raise. My focus was not so much on whether Colson’s statement was true, but on what it means. To summarize: God, through His self-revelation, has given us a structure of knowledge and a background of information by which we must interpret and understand everything.
Whether this is true obviously matters, too, though; so I wrote:
This is but one brief illustration of what Colson was getting at….
But was his statement true? Is Christianity really the explanation for everything? Again, space will not allow me to address that question here the way it deserves (though I’m happy to do so at www.thinkingchristian.net).
Real Knowledge of God Makes All the Difference
The question surely comes down to this: did God create the universe, and did He reveal His ways to us through the Bible such that we can understand what He has said? Do we have real knowledge of the Person and purpose by which the world was made and we humans came to be the way we are? If so, that knowledge must make all the difference.
This does not mean that we do not live in a natural world where ordinary things happen in ordinary ways. It means rather that we have a different perspective on those ordinary things: they can often have extraordinary significance under God. Every choice matters.
It also does not mean that we ought actually to use the word “God” in every explanation, as for example (using Ohm’s Law for electricity),
Voltage equals current times resistance, because God made it that way (and we hope He doesn’t change His mind too often!).
No, for when we’re looking in the natural sphere, natural explanations are generally quite sufficient for the purpose. In the background, though, we can bear in mind that all this came from a Person who created a world where we can count on natural events happening predictably in natural ways. Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project, provides a great example of that mindset:
As a scientist who is also a believer, virtually everything that we uncover day after day about the human genome and how it works is also a glimpse of God’s mind. My work is a celebration of our understanding of nature, but more importantly a celebration of what God has done.
Open For Questions
Again, though, do we really have knowledge of God and His purposes? The controversy on this is undeniable. My position is that God has given us considerable and very sufficient evidence that He is real, through the record of the Bible, through His work in history, through what He has created, and through His work in the lives of many, many followers.
There’s a space limitation here in this blog, too, but in the right-hand column of this web page you’ll see a link for “Evidences,” which will refer you to much additional information on this (or just click here). There is also another set of evidence-oriented blog entries you can reach from the right-hand column here, the former home page of this blog.
And to save you the trouble of searching for specifics, the comments section below is open for your questions.
(Thanks to Mark D. Roberts for the Francis Collins link.)
January 28th 2008
Here are 69 pages of evidences and reasoning on behalf of the historical truth of the resurrection. I just found out about it, so I haven’t had time to read it, but I’m sure it’s worth passing along:
1. A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth [PDF] — A draft of an article written by Lydia and Tim McGrew for the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, edited by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland.
January 13th 2008
From Gladio Mentis - The Sword Of The Mind: Hopeless Hypotheses:
For my purposes, a “hopeless hypothesis” is an idea that, even if true, either must be or should be treated as untrue for all practical purposes. This puts a special onus on anyone claiming a “hopeless hypothesis” to be genuinely true – they have to explain what alternative to believe, and give reasons how and why to do so.
…
The practical use of these ideas is as follows: First, the fact that even atheists see the value in certain ideas, even if they aren’t true, makes logically consistent systems such as Christianity deserving of at least their grudging respect. Second, some ideas being espoused by anti-Christians aren’t worth believing under any circumstances. Let’s face it, at least the Christian worldview is internally consistent – we can live out exactly what we believe. The atheist has to “pretend” to have free will, and “pretend” that life has meaning, even though that’s not a supportable part of their worldview. Thus the lesson from Pascal’s Wager, that Christianity is something worth pursuing even if all we get in eternity is oblivion.
That’s worth thinking about. I want to caution you, though, against reading into it something “MedicineMan” didn’t write. Some will think he means that Pascal’s wager proves Christianity. That’s not what he’s saying. I’ll leave it to you to read what he really did say; and you can also look to his two previous related posts here and here.
But I will highlight one point from the first quoted paragraph. Some say that unless we can prove the truth of Christianity (or any religion, for that matter), then our default position ought to be to presume there is no God. MedicineMan’s “special onus” here is a challenge that presumption.
