Archive - April, 2011

Atheism, The Paper Tiger

You’ll forgive me if I am a bit snarky, but I’m not going to pull any punches. You’ve been warned. (This is also going to be somewhat link-heavy; to really follow along you might have to follow me around the internet. I will also be wordy… pack a lunch.) I have two main points. First, atheism is a paper tiger. Second, the real threat to Christianity is not found outside the church, but from within. I suppose the first bleeds into the latter in a way, but they are somewhat separate points.

Now by atheism I am referring, for the sake of this post, to popular atheism such as you’ll hear from the average person, advocated in comments on facebook, the same  kind that’s advocated by the popular atheist evangelists like Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins. These guys are not sophisticated thinkers. They are not philosophers and they frankly, don’t even care enough to do any homework on what they speak on. The whole sorry bunch should have stuck to Dawkins’s wise decision to not publicly defend himself (see here: Dawkins is too busy to debate Craig1). Craig has systematically destroyed all of his intellectual challengers. Even the honest atheists say as much. Take this blog post for example. Continue Reading…

Because He Lives: Evidence for the Resurrection

I am fortunate in that I can listen to a lot of audio while I work. One particular show I listen to is the Don Johnson Radio Show (It’s now an internet radio and podcast. Click here for details). A few weeks ago Don and Brandon, the hosts, talked with an atheist caller in an excruciatingly painful display of irrationalism. Hat tip to Don and Brandon for their extreme patience. I recommend listening regularly—though that particular show might give you a headache.

Anyway, the caller used a phrase that’s all too common among atheists as a dismissal of religions. Simply, he says that “faith is belief in the absence of evidence.” Unfortunately, too many Christians accept this dichotomy as well, as do other religions. I know the LDS missionaries that I spent about 2 months talking with last year held that view. Their explanation for why we saw little or no evidence for the historical claims of Joseph Smith was because if they could prove it, there wouldn’t be need for faith.

This is not what Christianity means by faith. Continue Reading…

Omniscience and Justice

Prison ?

Yesterday John Piper relayed an RC Sproul quote that read,

God would be perfectly just to allow me to be thrown in prison for life for a crime I did not commit.

Think about that a minute. I’ve spent a day pondering it. It’s quite a provocative statement and yet it, I think, demonstrates a few very important points. I think intuitively we (and when I say we, I mean I and perhaps others) think that this cannot be right. We rightly resent the punishment of the innocent in our own legal system. We should strive for justice in our legal system. To imprison the innocent is not just. And yet, such a statement above goes to demonstrate how limited we are, that God’s ways are not our ways, for the quotation above is true.

Continue Reading…