Friday, September 10, 2010

2010-09-10

  • James White interacts with Dr. Jones, of the “Burn the Qur’an” event. My Attempt to Reason with Dr. Jones of Gainesville

  • T-fan: “No one would be able to protest (on their blogs) what some private citizens are planning on doing in Florida, unless they protested what the U.S. government did in Afghanistan (referring to this).” If I Ran the Blogosphere

  • T-fan cites Augustine, “It is by these manners of speech, when we speak of things that do not happen to God as though they did, that we acknowledge it is he who makes them happen to us, those things at least that are praiseworthy, and these only to the extent that scriptural usage allows it. I mean, we certainly ought not to say anything of the sort about God, which we do not read in his scriptures.” He then contrasts this with the Romanist approach, where it is claimed that Romanist dogmas are ‘fitting’. Yet they have no support in Scripture, and their ideas of ‘fitness’ run counter to the narrative of Scripture. Scripture or Fitness - Two Standards Compared

  • Hays observes that while Christians are oft accused by atheists of lying when we claim that atheism can’t justify objective moral norms, it seems tat an increasing number of atheists are indeed coming out of the closet on the moral nihilism implicit in a naturalistic Darwinian worldview. Evolutionary amorality

  • Hays has some comments on Hawking’s disability: i) Hawking is not an idiot, nor should anyone mock his disability. ii) Hawking’s disability isn’t necessarily irrelevant to the quality of his latest book, as such a degenerative illness is a significant impediment to writing. Hence he cowrote his latest book; he isn’t up to such a task himself. iii) Atheists gleefully discounted Antony Flew as a senile old man because he coauthored his final book. iv) Although Hawking’s not an “idiot,” he is a “fool” in the Biblical sense of the word. Is Hawking's disability germane-

  • Hays writes that while Darwinians claim their theory is falsifiable, there are a few problems: i) Darwinians can always add another caveat to their theory. They have generated many face-saving distinctions and harmonistic devices which can reconcile their theory with opposing lines of evidence. ii) While evolutionists will narrate an evolutionary pathway given the state of the evidence, when this is confronted by the evidence, the evolutionary biologist simply comes up with a new backstory. The theory itself is never challenged – the backstory is rewritten to obtain the desired result. iii) Darwinians also rely on circular evidence (e.g. phylogeny). Is evolution falsifiable-

  • DeYoung argues that for Christians to burn the Qur’an is to shoot oneself in the foot. i) Increased opposition against American forces. ii) Missionaries in Muslim lands may be put at risk. iii) News outlets give hours of coverage to one fringe pastor while the honorable deeds of thousands of churches go unnoticed. iv) Muslims extremism is seen more and more as a product of Western aggravation. Many Americans and Europeans will say, “Well, you can hardly blame them.” No, we can still blame them. Killing people or threatening to kill people is not one of the acceptable responses to your holy book being burned. It’s like telling your little brother, “Touch me again and I’ll clobber you.” The little brother is stupid to touch him, but the older brother is still wrong to punch him. This will be lost on most people who will see pictures of a church burning Korans and ignore the fact that some Muslims may see this an excuse to kill. Of all the ways to voice your opposition to Muslim radicals and the Islamic religion this is about the stupidest. It’s not like Acts 19, where people burned their own books. A non-stupid person would listen to these reproofs (Proverbs 12:1). Burning the Koran and Shooting Yourself in the Foot

  • Challenge: You're a Christian? How do you handle the problem of evil?
    Response: Me? Mainly, by switching sides, by God's grace. The problem-of-evil dodge (NEXT! #25)

  • James Anderson: “Needless to say, the Koran-burning stunt (apparently now abandoned, thankfully) was a phenomenally stupid idea. But does anybody know the Arabic for “double standards”?” One Good Burn Deserves Another

  • Bird provides this quote: “Scholarship is an exercise of obedience to Jesus Christ. It helps prepare the church for fresh words and deeds… when Christian scholars engage with contemporary thought, it’s not because the church needs protecting from the world, but because Christ is already in the world and he calls us to meet him there.” Ben Myers on Christian scholarship

  • CMI argues that Tim Keller’s paper, which tries to find a way for Christians to accept a ‘literal’ Adam and evolution, forces a reinterpretation of key parts of Genesis. i) Keller’s argument for evolution from what God could have done is almost meaningless because God could do anything that doesn’t contradict His own nature. ii) While Keller claims that whether Genesis 1 is poetry will ‘always be debated’ he clearly takes a non-literal view himself. Rather than the typical parallelism which characterizes Hebrew poetry, he thinks that “refrains” in the narrative justify taking it as a poetic, non-literal text. But saying that a text uses exalted, semi-poetical language is quite different from saying that it is poetry. iii) Keller’s insight has been far less than “obvious” to generations of Jews and Christians, including biblical authors, who have studied Genesis and interpreted Genesis 1 to be a straightforward account of what actually happened. iv) Young, who Keller claims cites as support, despises such compromise: “Whenever ‘science’ and the Bible are in conflict, it is always the Bible that, in one manner or another, must give way. We are not told that ‘science’ should correct its answers in light of Scripture. Always it is the other way around. Yet this is really surprising, for the answers which scientists have provided have frequently changed with the passing of time.” v) The language of Genesis does not negate its grammatical constructions, which point to a chronological sequence (cf. Number 7, which is similar, yet none claim it was not meant as historical narrative). vi) Keller argues that the author of Genesis 1 did not want it to be taken literally, as we can’t read both Genesis 1 and 2 as straightforward accounts of events because Genesis 1 shows the light before the sun, and vegetation before the atmosphere. However, early Christian writers observed that this historical order was to demonstrate where things originated, that it might not be attributed to the sun. Also, in Genesis 2:5 it says that the types of plants that did not exist yet were the bush of the field and the small plant of the field—that is, cultivated plants. vii) Keller suggests that evolutionist Christians and biblical creationists should focus on the “Grand Theory of Evolution” as a common enemy, which would hopefully make it easier to draw a distinction between that and EBP. But in practice, as exemplified by the Biologos crowd he runs with, theistic evolutionists and atheistic evolutionists make biblical creation their common enemy—and it’s often hard to tell them apart. viii) Keller’s answer is to accept a literal Adam and Eve as a product of evolutionary biological processes. Keller realizes the problem of death before sin, but gives the rather weak counter-argument that the creation could not have been perfect if Satan was around, anyway. Keller thinks that God took Adam out of a population of tool-makers ix) It is impossible to read Keller’s essay without being struck by the weakness of his assertions. The qualifiers that predominate give a sense of something that cannot be more charitably described than as wishy-washiness. It is possible, or it could be, etc. A response to Timothy Keller's 'Creation, Evolution and Christian Laypeople'

  • JT provides a number of quotes to the effect that “Just Me and My Bible” Is Unbiblical, including this by Spurgeon: “It seems odd, that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves, should think so little of what he has revealed to others.”

  • DeYoung cites an analysis which attributes a long tradition of preaching to ‘felt needs’ to the well-intentioned but misguided philosophy of Harry Fosdick, who argued that preachers should start with “a life issue, a real problem, personal or social, perplexing the mind or disturbing the conscience; face the problem fairly, deal with it honestly, and throw such light on it from the spirit of Christ, that people will be able to think more clearly and live more nobly because of that sermon.” Thus the “literature of the past thirty years has been influenced by an understanding of “preaching as counseling on a group scale” and pastoring or shepherding as “tender and solicitous concern.”” This understanding is problematic: i) It owes more to modern therapeutic understandings than the image of the shepherd. ii) The shepherd’s task was not only to comfort and support but also to guide, protect, and ensure the general welfare of those in his charge. iii) This sort of preaching, in its emphasis on acceptance, never confronts with a word of judgment or guidance on the concrete demands of Christian life. iv) It’s also very individualistic. v) Rather, Paul uses imagery from the family life (see 1 Cor. 4:14-21) and the construction (see 1 Cor. 3:16-17) to describe preaching as the active involvement in ensuring the well-being of the community. How to Preach Like a Liberal

  • Beggar’s All: “The simple fact of the matter is that sober historical inquiry, a discipline given to us by thoroughly committed Christians in the Renaissance, has never been the friend of many of Rome's dogmatic claims, but has in fact demonstrated that the "historical" support for her dogmatic claims is weak, suspect, or else very easily and quite reasonably challengeable.Protestants can face history with eyes open

  • Phillips writes, “So the Qu'ran-burning has been cancelled. Or not. It's confusing. I don't think much of this pastor overall, but oddly the predictable barking, screaming, foam-flecked Muslim reaction has rather made his point, hasn't it?” Also, “American Academy of Pediatrics, while with one side of its mouth denouncing hypersexualized media, with the other side also denounces abstinence education. Hm. I wonder if that's also their policy on cigarette smoking? I'm thinking... no.” Hither and thither 9/10/10

  • For those so interested: From Darwin to Dover—A broad overview of creation vs evolution

  • JT cites some writing advice from Lewis: “Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.  Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.  Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”  In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the things you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us the thing is “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please, will you do my job for me.”  Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.” C.S. Lewis’s Advice on Writing Well

  • CreationSafaris: “A “bizarre” new dinosaur fossil found in Spain with a hump on its back that resembles a fin also has quill knobs on its arms, interpreted as attachment points for feathers. For this reason, the BBC News announced that it “may” yield clues to the origin of birds.”…  The fossil, however, does not provide unequivocal evidence for a dinosaur-bird kinship; Live Science said this fossil “surprises and puzzles experts” and even National Geographic which a decade ago embarrassed itself with Archaeoraptor seemed to downplay the dino-bird link, calling it a “carnivorous camel” in its headline.  Whatever attachment points the bumps on its skimpy forearms provided (assumed to be quill knobs for feathers) were certainly not anything like flight feathers of birds. ” Dino-Bird Link Confused by New Fossil

  • Pyro posts an older comment: “there comes a point somewhere when a person's questioning the plain truth of Scripture ceases to reflect the weakness of an immature faith and instead becomes an expression of rank unbelief… I think that point is reached sooner rather than later. The more someone questions Scripture, the more I question that person's profession of faith.” Ignorance, or Unbelief-

  • Challies has a number of interesting resources on the Screwtape Letters here. The Screwtape Letters

  • AiG answers the question, Doesn’t the Order of Fossils in the Rock Record Favor Long Ages? They conclude, “While there are underlying thick strata sequences which are devoid of fossils and were therefore formed during creation week and the pre-Flood era, most of the fossil record is a record of death and burial of animals and plants during the Flood, as described in the biblical account, rather than being the order of a living succession that suffered the occasional mass extinction. While there are underlying thick strata sequences which are devoid of fossils and were therefore formed during creation week and the pre-Flood era, most of the fossil record is a record of death and burial of animals and plants during the Flood, as described in the biblical account, rather than being the order of a living succession that suffered the occasional mass extinction.” http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab2/do-rock-record-fossils-favor-long-ages

  • Phillips asks whether burning the Qur’an is a good idea. i) Part of him really likes the idea. “Muslim extremists — which is closer to a tautology than one wishes — threaten and target anyone who dares speak out against any aspect of their cult, including cartoonists and writers. Here's a church saying, "Oh yeah? Take this!"” ii) But by the age of four or five, usually one has begun to develop the ability to think about impulses before acting on them. iii) It is a very bad idea. iv) Obama’s opposition is really encouragement to do it, since he only gets excited opposing his personal enemies, and not America’s (whom he embraces and flatters and enables). v) Gen. Petraeus’s warning carries much more freight. “We all know that "those" people in "those" countries are nuts, frankly. They'll riot and chant "death to America" over a false rumor.” vi) But really, it's a bad idea for a Christian church to do. The church’s calling isn’t to show courage, or even the right Gospelly contempt of other religions. “the message of Christ's church is not "Stop being a Muslim, stop being an atheist, stop being a homosexual, stop being a Hindu, stop being a Roman Catholic." The message of Christ's church is the Gospel. The message of Christ's church is the holiness of God, the sinfulness of man, the Lordship and incarnate deity of Christ, the atoning death of Christ, and the call to repentant faith in Christ. That is what should mark a church. That is what people should think of, when they think of a Christian church.” vii) Now it is quite appropriate to burn a Qu'ran. Who could perhaps burn it? Converts from the deadly cult of Islam, following the example of the Ephesians (Acts 19:17-20). Not necessary, but it would make sense, which this stunt does not.  Burning the Qu'ran- good idea- Bad idea-

  • JT citing Lloyd-Jones: “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.”  So Augustine: “No one believes anything unless one first thought it believable… Everything that is believed is believed after being preceded by thought… Not everyone who thinks believes, since many think in order not to believe; but everyone who believes thinks, thinks in believing and believes in thinking.” Faith and Thinking

  • Calvary Grace Church has a post discussing the benefits of church membership here: Blessings Beyond Compare

  • Hays addresses Dawkins’ one-liner, “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” i) “It’s striking that so many atheists seem to think that’s a compelling reason to be an atheist. After all, they pride themselves on their rational superiority. So why are they impressed by such a lame argument?” ii) Is it logical to reject every explanation if you reject every explanation but one? ii) How does knowing why I reject something mean that I know why you reject something? You can’t simple combine one man’s reason for rejecting something with another man’s reason for rejecting something, for they may have different reasons. e.g. the atheist reject Mormonism because he rejects theism generally; the Christian has specific issues with Mormonism. iii) It’s not true that Christians simply reject all other “gods” save our own. There is something behind the pagan pantheon: There’s an occult reality which motivates, animates, and empowers paganism. “What does it say about “free-thinkers” and “rationalists” when they find a fallacious slogan like this convincing?”  We are all atheists

  • Burk addresses the question of whether Jesus affirmed a gay couple in Matthew 8:5-13, as put forward by a billboard ad! The billboard reflects an obscure interpretation: “the “gay couple” that Jesus affirmed was a Roman soldier and his young boy sex-slave. In short, Jennings and Liew argue that the Greek word pais—usually rendered as “servant” in verse 6—is actually a mistranslation. Jesus didn’t heal the centurion’s “servant.” Rather, Jesus healed the centurion’s “boy-love” (p. 468). The paralytic is a young boy who was the sexual plaything of a Roman centurion. The authors contend that such “forced pederastic relations” between Roman soldiers and young boys were both “legally permissible and socially prevalent” during Jesus’ time” i) In the Sermon on the Mount alone (a favorite text among progressives), Jesus unambiguously condemns sexual immorality (Matthew 5:28) while affirming the sanctity of the marital union (Matthew 5:32). Are these authors seriously going to suggest that Jesus goes against the Old Testament and his own teaching to affirm the alleged homosexual conduct of the centurion and his sex-slave? ii) The reason is completely implausible. Jennings’ and Liew’s novel interpretation of Matthew 8:5-13 has not been widely received in scholarship and was subsequently debunked in the same journal on historical grounds. This is the kind of revisionist historicism that supports progressive interpretations of key texts. It’s not serious, though it is seriously damning, and people should pay no heed to it. Did Jesus Affirm a Gay Couple-

  • Trueman: “One of the things that marks the world today, particularly the academic world, is the importance of specialisation and expertise.  We all tend to trust the experts because who are we, poor mites, to question what somebody who has spent a lifetime studying a particularly narrow area says about a given field? One obvious example doing the rounds in cultural circles at the moment is evolution.  Everywhere we are being told that to reject evolution is simply an egregious act of willful ignorance.  Yet how many of us are really qualified to judge the arguments? … scientists have become a kind of priesthood, hijacking language and demanding the same kind of uncritical capitulation from others as the older, more openly religious priests did in the past.” “The implications of all this -- the cult of the specialist, enhanced as it is in an ironic twist by postmodern impotence and intensified by the deluge of information and the pressure to publish in academic circles -- poses an acute problem to the church: how can we respond?     My belief is that part of that response needs to be the reassertion of the importance of the generalist, both in the church and in the seminary.” In Praise of the Generalist I- The Problem (Carl Trueman)

  • Trueman goes on to describe the generalist. “This single doctrinal qualification (Titus 1:8), however, carries within it the demands for intellectual, theological breadth: the elder needs to know the word he has been taught.  That implies a good knowledge of the biblical text and the tradition of interpretation of the text -- in turn implying a knowledge of history and how that word has come down to us.  Then, the reference to sound doctrine implies a knowledge of the same and, one assumes, the ability to relate textual exegesis with doctrinal synthesis to contemporary application.  A radical separation of the three, or exclusive specialisation in only one of them is not what is envisaged here.  Rather it is a  matter of a healthy generalism, a knowledge of the truth in its broadest sense, from biblical text to current pastoral context… What is being demanded is not absolute perfection of knowledge, any more than the requirement not to be greedy for gain implies that the elder must be sinless or immediately resign if he is ever tempted think a covetous thought; what is required is a credible,  public competence  in this area.”  In Praise of the Generalist II- The Possibility and the Imperative (Carl Trueman)

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