I should almost be okay with it by now. I’ve had enough experience. I had surgery on my foot last Monday afternoon, for the fifth time on that foot. I was blessed with structural flaws that are to blame for it all. I should be okay with it, and honestly I’m past the fear part now. The lack of control still gets to me. Surgery is such a passive experience. You lie there and people do things to you. Part…
How do we respond to a tragic horror like this weekend’s shooting in Orlando? If you’re just asking now, you might be asking the wrong question. It’s not that there’s no answer. There is, and on one level it’s quite simple. I do not say it is easy, but at least it can be stated simply: We respond in love according to truth and grace, as always. Jesus was full of grace and truth (John 1:14), and God is love…
Edward Feser recently posted a “Note on Falsification,” beginning, Antony Flew’s famous 1950 article “Theology and Falsification” posed what came to be known as the ‘falsificationist challenge’ to theology. A claim is falsifiable when it is empirically testable — that is to say, when it makes predictions about what will be observed under such-and-such circumstances such that, if the predictions don’t pan out, the claim is thereby shown to be false. The idea that a genuinely scientific claim must be falsifiable…
Book Review God’s Crime Scene: A Cold-Case Detective Examines the Evidence For a Divinely Created Universe Crime Scenes If this book is about a “crime scene,” I have two additional charges to file. One is against myself. J. Warner Wallace sent this book to me months ago, and I haven’t been able to read and review it until now. I’m criminally late. One is against the author. He’s criminally competent. I like to think of myself as a fairly capable…
I don’t know how to speak this well enough. It would take a poet. God is good, and his way is good. It’s very good. It’s rich, it’s beautiful, it’s mulit-dimensional, it’s mysterious where it ought to be, and it’s plain where it should be. It’s dizzyingly satisfying. It’s glorious. It’s right. I don’t know how to say that well enough, partly because there’s an aspect in it of “you had to be there.” You could go there, actually, because…
We’ve been looking at the question, does God care? The apostle Paul looked at it, too, in the fifth chapter of Romans. He was faced with an apparent contradiction, you see. In chapter previous chapters he had explained that we’re all caught in rebellion against God, but that God had provided a way to make us right (justify) us with him through faith in Christ. Romans 5:1-2 summarizes it: Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace…
I was with a small group of Ratio Christi leaders the other day, talking about the problem of pain and suffering. It wasn’t just on a philosophical level, such as, “How could an all-good, all-powerful God exist when there’s pain and suffering in the world?” It was about the other kind of pain and suffering question: “Does God care? And how am I going to keep going?” It wasn’t just theoretical, either. It was about my life, and my family’s. We’ve been through…
I spent a summer in China back in the early 1980s. I was absolutely enthralled with the architecture, the commerce, and especially the language, which was the main thing I was there to study. I would have loved to go back and spend my life there, but it was not the path for me. While I was there, though, I kept wondering, What would it be like for this to feel normal? What would it be like for dragons and…
Paul Copan was more patient than I might have been in his chapter on the jealousy of God. He opens with three mini-vignettes: Recall Richard Dawkins’s put-down of God, claiming that he breaks into a “monumental rage whenever his own chosen people flirted with a rival god.” Popular TV icon Oprah Winfrey said that she was turned off to the Christian faith when she heard a preacher affirm that God is jealous. Bill Maher of Religulous fame (or infamy) has…
