Abortion, Gay Marriage, Morality, Religion

Manhattan Declaration

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Recently, a group of 152 Christian leaders from Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism came together to sign a declaration that states in clear terms Christian support for the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, and religious freedom – all of which are under attack in the United States and around the world.

None of these positions are new, but what is remarkable is that such a large and variegated group should gather together in support of the positions.

Check out the declaration and sign it.  Let your voice be heard on these issues.

General Apologetics, Religion

Are Religious Folks More Irrational?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Not according to an article published last year by the Wall Street Journal.  The columnist cites research which indicates that people who never worship at a traditional house of worship are more likely to be superstitious.  Below is an excerpt:

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

It seems that the modern, secular myth that traditional religious folks, especially Christians, are generally more irrational and prone to believing things without evidence, is clearly false.  It turns out that everyone, and especially the non-religious, believes some things without evidence.

No group of any size has the market cornered on cold, hard, rational thinking.  In my life, I have met irrational Christians, atheists, Muslims, and Mormons, to name a few.  Each group has its share of irrational followers.

Instead of poking fun at the irrational followers of a movement, why don’t we seek out the rational and reasonable members, and speak to them?  I think it’s because those people might actually make us think, and reconsider some of our cherished beliefs.  That wouldn’t be as fun, would it?

Essential Beliefs, Faith and Works, Salvation, Theology

Do Catholics Affirm Justification by Faith Alone?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

One of the most remarkable lectures I ever heard at an apologetics conference was a Friday morning session with Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College.  Kreeft is a highly respected Catholic scholar who has taught at BC for many years and written more than 60 books.

Kreeft’s lecture focused on his desire to see Roman Catholics and Evangelicals move toward unity, certainly a worthy goal as long as we’re not compromising any essential doctrines.  But what I wasn’t expecting to hear was his statement that Catholics now agree that justification is by faith alone.  Yes, you read that right.

Kreeft explained that in 1999 the Catholic Church and Lutheran World Federation jointly issued a declaration on the doctrine of justification, the central issue of the Reformation.  In 2006, the World Methodist Council also voted to affirm this declaration.

In this declaration, the Catholic Church agreed that justification is by faith alone and it withdrew the condemnations of the Council of Trent toward those Protestants that affirmed justification by faith alone.  Kreeft explained that the Council of Trent was condemning the idea that works are not part of the totality of salvation, which is composed of justification, sanctification, and glorification.  Luther, on the other hand, was specifically speaking of justification, not sanctification and glorification, when he said works were not involved in salvation.  So the Council of Trent misunderstood Luther, according to Kreeft.  It took 400 years to figure this out, but better late than never.

During Q&A, Kreeft was quick to add that there are many other areas of disagreement that need to be discussed among Catholics and Protestants, but he believed that if Catholics and Protestants can come to agreement on the doctrine of justification, which was the defining controversy of the Reformation, then there is hope to come to agreement on other issues as well.

I have read the declaration and I believe Kreeft’s interpretation of it is indeed correct.  I invite all who are interested in this issue to read the declaration.  It is not that long and can be read by someone who is moderately familiar with theological terminology.  Also, to preempt fruitless discussion, I would ask that folks not comment or jump to any conclusions about this issue until you have read the declaration yourself.  I am very curious to hear reactions from both Catholics and Protestants alike.

General Apologetics

How Should We Disagree With Each Other?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

One of the most difficult things to do is carry on a rational and calm conversation with someone that disagrees with you.  When I first started studying Christian apologetics, I figured that all I had to do was learn all the evidence for the truthfulness of Christianity and then tell people that evidence.

Boy, was I wrong!  I have learned  a great deal of that evidence through my seminary courses and also through the great past and present apologists, but often when I pass that information on, I find myself in a heated conversation where rationality has gone out the window.

One of the best apologists of our day is Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason.  In a session I attended at an apologetics conference, Koukl reminded the audience of some simple guidelines when conversing with someone who does not agree with you about Christianity.

First, he stressed that we must listen carefully.  Instead of trying to talk first, listen and let the other person do the talking.

Second, when your conversation partner makes a claim with which you disagree, instead of attacking him, ask what he means by his statement.  In other words, dig for more information and try to find out what the other person is really saying.  Often, what you think he meant is not what he meant at all.

Third, after you have learned exactly what he means, ask how he came to his conclusion.  Why does he believe what he believes?  What is the evidence or the argument that convinced him?

Once you have listened to your friend and tried to understand his point of view, you have earned the right to present your side.  Only then will your friend will be more willing to listen to you and consider your viewpoint.

This same advice can be applied to the online world where we have heated exchanges on blogs and Facebook.  I have noticed that there are precious few people who consistently try to understand what the other person is saying before attacking.  We all have a lot of information and a lot of opinions, but we stink at discussing those things with people who may not see things our way.

My hope and prayer is that Christians (including myself) can greatly improve in this area.  What about you?  Can you do better?

Bible Interpretation

Should You Only Read a Bible Verse?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

If you do, don’t stop!  Read the rest of the chapter and even the book you found the verse in.

One of the biggest mistakes Christians make when reading the Bible is opening it up to a book and only reading one verse.  We all have favorite verses that we like to quote, but there is a danger.

The danger with only focusing on isolated verses is that the Bible wasn’t written that way and was never intended to be read that way.  The books of the Bible were originally written as complete works, and they did not contain verse or chapter numbers.  These were added hundreds of years later to help readers navigate the Bible more easily.

Verses and chapters are very helpful to Bible students, but they are also a curse.  They have taught Christians to atomize the Bible into thousands of isolated sentences.  Remember that a verse only makes sense in context with the surrounding paragraphs and the book it is found in.

Christian scholar Gary Habermas emphasizes reading verses in context.  He tells a story of a woman who was angry at God for allowing suffering in her life.  She continuously quoted James 5:15 as evidence that God had promised to heal believers of their suffering.

Here was his response.  Habermas asked the woman, “Did the same James that wrote James 5 also write James 1?”

Whatever verse 15 in chapter 5 means, it must be read in context with the rest of the book of James, which clearly says that Christians will suffer trials and that they should “consider it pure joy.”  This lady had fallen into the trap of reading a single verse and not reading the rest of the book the verse is found in.

Don’t make the same mistake.  If you find yourself quoting a Bible verse, that’s wonderful.  Just make sure that you have read the entire book the verse is in and make sure that your understanding of the verse is consistent with the context.

General Apologetics, Historical Christ, New Testament Reliability, Religion, Skeptics

Are Religious People Unable to Get History Right?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In my frequent conversations with non-Christians, I hear the following kinds of statements: “I can’t believe what the Bible authors wrote because they were religiously motivated.”

The idea seems to be that if you are religious, you will not be able to tell the truth about historical events.  You will twist history to fit your agenda.

This may surprise some of you, but I can see where this viewpoint comes from.  I run into various religious groups who do monkey around with history and fail to get the facts right.  In fact, the very reason I could never be a Mormon is because Joseph Smith manufactured an entire history of the Americas that has absolutely no external evidence to support it.

But, just because some religious groups manufacture history does not mean that all religious groups manufacture history.  As I’ve written before on this blog, the writers of the Bible get their history right whenever archaeology can confirm it (see Did the New Testament Writers Record Fact or Fiction? Part 7).

At the very least, a skeptic should acknowledge this truth about Christianity and not lump it in with religions who do not accurately portray history.  The Bible deserves the benefit of the doubt as it has proven itself many times to be historically accurate.

The well-known scholar N. T. Wright explains that the New Testament writers were clearly trying to record accurate history alongside their theological teachings.  It is only modern man who struggles with the juxtaposition of the two.  Watch this brief video clip below posted by The John Ankerberg Show.

Books of the Bible, Theology

Did Jesus Want Us to Think?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

According to Martin Lloyd-Jones, the answer is “yes.”  Below is a quote from Lloyd-Jones where he is commenting on Matt. 6:30, from the Sermon on the Mount.  He argues that Jesus’ words indicate that he expected his listeners to be actively using their minds to make logical deductions from the evidence around them.  The source of this quote is Tim Challies’ blog.

Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph, is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him. …

We must spend more time in studying our Lord’s lessons in observation and deduction. The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical. We do not just sit down in an armchair and expect marvelous things to happen to us. That is not Christian faith. Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them. …

Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else, and, as we put it, he goes round and round in circles. That is the essence of worry. … That is not thought; that is the absence of thought, a failure to think.

Evil, Pain, and Suffering, Free Will, Morality

Will You Give Up Your Free Will to Rid the World of Evil?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

One of the most common objections to belief in God is the problem of evil.  One form of the problem of evil sounds like this: “I can’t believe in a God who allows children to be sexually molested.  If there was a God, He wouldn’t allow such things to occur.”

I can understand the objection, and it’s an objection that all Christians have struggled with one time or another.  However, there is a response to this challenge.

The sexual molester has free will and has chosen to exercise that free will to commit an act of evil against another person.  In fact, every human being has free will and makes choices every day to do good or evil.  God has given each of us this power of choice.

The objector wants God to take away the power of free choice from the molester to prevent him from doing evil.  Even though this crime is particularly heinous, the objector must surely want God to stop a variety of other acts of evil as well.  After all, why stop with child molestation when genocide, rape, and torture go on every day?

The only way for God to stop all of these crimes, these acts of evil, is to remove the power of free will from every person.  Some of you might say, “Wait a minute!  I don’t commit these horrible crimes.  Why do I have to lose my free will?”  You may not commit these kinds of crimes, but you commit acts of evil every day, most likely.  They are just more subtle.

Do you lie?  Do you steal?  Do you gossip about other people?  Are you committing adultery? If you don’t think that you ever do evil, just ask your spouse or a sibling.  I’m sure they can provide some examples to you.  The truth is that we all do bad things and that we are all capable of horrible crimes.

So, if God is going to rid the world of moral evil he is going to have to take away every person’s free will first.  Would you be willing to lose your power of free will to rid the world of evil?  If not, then you can hardly blame God for the evil in the world.  You must blame yourself.  After all, when given the chance to rid the world of evil, you declined!

If you would give up your free will, your ability to choose between good and evil, then I encourage you to become a Christian, because that’s exactly what Christians, in a sense, are doing.  Christians acknowledge that the world would be a much better place if we would follow the one man who consistently chose good for his entire human life, Jesus Christ.

When we submit to him, we are submitting our power of free choice to his direction and instruction.  We are saying to Jesus, “We want to do what you did.  We want to choose the way you chose, because you always chose good and never chose evil!”  Instead of every day demanding that our own choices be paramount, we strive to subject our free will to him, and he gives us the power to live as he did.

Our reward for submitting our free will to Jesus results in our spending eternity in heaven.  In heaven, our free will is perfected, as we will always and forever only choose the good.

Religion

The New York Times and Crucifixions

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Richard John Neuhaus, the editor of First Things magazine who passed away earlier this year, had a special way of finding humor in news reporting about religion.  I was reading one such commentary recently that caused me to laugh out loud – and for several minutes.  Not wanting to keep this humor to myself, please read below a short commentary of Neuhaus’ on the religion reporting of the New York Times in 1993:

St. Philip’s Catholic Church in San Francisco is apparently one of those places where “the action’s at.” Jane Gross of the New York Times reports on a recent family festival held there, and the point of the report is that, my goodness, there were all kinds of families present—“stepfamilies and foster families, multigenerational families and gay families . . . and other configurations that have yet to be named by social scientists or counted by statisticians.” Ms. Gross continues: “Even in this old-fashioned, godly haven, with crucifixions on the walls and children in neat uniforms, the families have changed indelibly but the values have not.” Crucifixions on the walls? It seems the action gets a little rough at St. Philip’s. The pastor, Father Michael Healy, draws the lesson to be learned: “There’s such a thing as family values, but who’s to say who’s living up to them?” Certainly not the pastor of St. Philip’s. (Crucifixions on the wall reminds us of a Detroit paper that reported some years ago on a Lutheran convention. “The procession was led by a young man carrying a 140-year-old crucifix.” But then, why should we expect journalists to know any more about religion than about other matters of consequence?)

“It seems the action gets a little rough at St. Philip’s.”  I love that line.

Creation

Why Do Scientists Believe the Universe is Almost 14 Billion Years Old? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Continuing from the first post on this topic, we will look at two more methods that physicists and astronomers use to determine the age of the universe.  Again, this information has been gathered from Hugh Ross’ A Matter of Days.

The third method physicists use to calculate the age of the universe is to measure the age of stars throughout the universe.  Stars are simple objects, composed of 100% gas, that burn through the process of nuclear fusion, which, according to Ross, is very well understood and experimentally verified.

Because the process of stellar burning is so well understood, the physicist or astronomer can determine the age of a star if he knows the mass, color, and brightness of the star (all characteristics that can be measured from earth).  From this data, the astronomer can know how long the star has been burning, which places a boundary on how old the universe must be (it can’t be any younger than the oldest star).

The fourth method physicists use to calculate the age of the universe is to measure the relative quantities of radioactive isotopes in the universe.  Radioactive isotopes are only produced by supernovae, which are supergiant stars in their last stage of burning.

It turns out that radioactive isotopes decay at rates (half-lives) that are well understood.  Uranium and thorium, for example, have half-lives of billions of years.  Since we still find uranium and thorium in the universe, we know that the universe cannot be so old that these isotopes had completely decayed out of existence.  That sets an upper limit of a few hundred billion years.

On the other hand, those isotopes with half-lives of millions of  years or less (e.g., plutonium, neptunium, technetium) cannot be found on the earth, so we know that at least a billion years have gone by for them to have disappeared.  Since astronomers know how much of these isotopes were produced by ancient supernovae, and they know the decay half-lives, by measuring the amounts of these isotopes in existence today, they can calculate how much time has passed since the first supernovae produced the first isotopes.  Obviously the universe must be older than this.

Summary and Conclusion

I hope you were able to follow, at least at a basic level, these four methods.  Ross claims that there are many other independent methods that have been used to calculate the age of the universe, but that these four are the most simple for lay people to understand.  What strikes me about these methods is that they rely on different and independent measurement techniques, but they all arrive at the same answer for the age of the universe – around 13.7 billion years.

It’s easy to attack one measurement technique as being inaccurate, but when four independent methods give you the same answer, you need to pay attention.  And remember, it’s actually more than 4 techniques.  The laws of physics used to date the universe are very well understood and experimentally verified to a great degree of precision.  To dismiss all of these independent measurements as erroneous betrays a lack of understanding of physics and mathematics.

If you find yourself still questioning these findings, ask yourself why.  The age of the universe does not at all undermine Scripture.  Whether the universe is 13.7 billion years old or 6,000 years old has no bearing on the truths taught in the Bible.  As Christians, we are to seek out the truth, no matter what it may be.  The true findings of science will never the contradict the Word of God, so engage with science and enjoy the discoveries that lie ahead of us.  We have nothing to fear!!

A Christian Apologetics Blog