All in all, I would say that the speakers were excellent. We only had one bad lecture and it was from Doug Geivett. I don’t want to desparage Dr. Geivett as an apologist in any way, but his particular talk was on the verge of horrible. It was rambling, way off-topic and, most disturbingly, exposed a severe lack of understanding of economics. His basic premise(when he finally got to it) was that when the country is made up of traditional families, that somehow makes our economic outlook better. He attributed this to “long term vision” that is natural in a traditional family(i.e., mom, dad, kids, no divorce, etc.). This is woefully simplistic and just shows a non-familiarity with basic economics.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for mom, dad, kids, no divorce, etc. I think that’s the ideal situation that all families should strive for. My beef is with saying that this is a driving factor in economic stability. He actually blamed the housing bubble/recession on a lack of family values. If that was the case then think about this. The 1920′s – 1940′s was probably the era of the most widespread traditional family values the country has ever seen. And yet we had the Great Depression. It doesn’t matter what type of families dominate the landscape. If the government comes in and rapes the economy then it’s going to cause economic problems. Bad ones.

Anyway, I was just disappointed to see such a lack of economic understanding in the upper ranks of Christian Philosophy and Apologetics circles. It would do Biola/Talbot a lot of good to hook up with The Mises Institute and bring some basic economics into their catalog.

One of the reasons we choose this comes from a deep desire to be honest with our children. They know St. Nicholas was a nice man from long ago, but we don’t teach that he is immortal or all-knowing. It is a small attempt to have our kids view us credible in our word. Here’s why that’s important. When you strip away the “fun” side of Santa, you are left with a man who is omniscient, immortal, and able to judge good and evil. Now who does that remind you of?

In my view, Christmas, and therefore the gifts we exchange should be a symbol of sacrificial love for one another. We encourage our kids to buy gifts with their own money that they earn. They realize they won’t get that Lego set they wanted, but they are so excited about what they are giving. My daughter likes to tell her younger brother, “You are getting the best present in the world!” She is talking about the one she bought for him. And he will say the same back. They know that they will not get everything they imagine, because there is no inexhaustible magic sack that all too easily fulfills their whims.

But they know a little more about Christ’s love shown by sacrifice. They know that gifts are not dependent on artificial good deeds. I don’t want my children to be good because they can get something. That has nothing to do with truth or training the selfish heart of the child. Or even more, I don’t want some goodness standard interfering with God’s view of our works apart from Him, which are filthy rags. Goodness is not a matter of ceasing a behavior. It is Christ laying His righteousness on us. Being good for spiritual insurance is so pervasive in our culture already. I don’t want to accentuate “righteousness by works” during Christmas.

We want to give a clear view of Christ. That His gift is free to anyone who believes. His love is not based how good we are. What happens if they compare themselves with other kids who get more? “Is that kid a better person than I? What more can I do, so I can get?” I don’t want to build on that philosophy any more than is natural to human nature. Instead, I want Christ to be center, and Santa Claus, in my humble view, is a thorn that grows up and chokes the truth of Christ in the minds of our depraved little ones.

How can Christ be pondered if their minds are in constant re-visitation to the myth and superstition of Santa Claus? One common argument is “Oh, come on. It’s just for fun!” Let me assure you, there is no shortage of fun in my house around Christmas. But it is a more humbled fun. We can focus on being together and working together. Sacrifice resonates in our minds and conversations as we make gingerbread houses together and recall the gifts we are going to give. My hope is, in this small way, we are a little better aware of our position before God and our fellow laborers, our children.

–My Wife, Guest Blogging

I will not give you a story synopsis. You can read it here if you want. I’m more interested in the ideas. The book can be best described as a novelized Cristopher Hitchens lecture. Take everything you know about the neo-atheist movement’s talking points and you will find them romanticized in this book. It’s so bad (for lack of a better term) that the book was hard to listen to in spots. It’s not just that “religion”(read, Christianity) is worthless or irrelevant, it’s that it’s evil and should be eradicated. That’s the tone throughout the entire work. That’s what makes it Hitchens-esque. So just what is so poorly handled in the book? Let me give you the high points.

Firstly, the idea that the big-bang is totally incompatible with creation theory permeates the book. This is something that has troubled me for quite a while now. There is a concerted effort on the part of the physics elite to baptize the big-bang back into the fold of atheism. And to a large degree, they are being successful at it. But the history of the big bang is wrought with hostility from the atheist camp. The big-bang/expanding universe idea was, from it’s inception, viewed as a threat to the uniformitarian view of natural science. Just look at what the big bang is. It says, in effect, that the universe exploded into existence from nothing at a fixed point of time in history. This fixed point of space-time is known commonly as a “singularity”. The threat to natural science was always that “something from nothing” is inexplainable apart from an outside creative force(or God). Take these references from Wikipedia:

Much time and effort was spent on the part of naturalists to disprove the big bang, and consequently, the expanding universe. But now that it’s truth is virtually undeniable, it’s time for physics to bring it into the fold and sweep the sordid past under the rug. And Preston does his best to run with that notion in Blasphemy. One of the characters actually said that Stephen Hawking had proved, through his equations, how the universe could spring into being from nothing. This is either wishful thinking on Preston’s part, or intentional mis-information. Hawking has done nothing of the sort. Now, I’m no physicist, but I do know how to read, and I can understand a well-explained argument. Read Hawking’s words for yourself:

Hawking’s theories of the universe appearing without cause out of nothingness depend on using what he calls “imaginary time”. He freely admits that his model doesn’t obtain if calculated with real time values. But then again, that doesn’t concern him. He doesn’t know what reality is anyway, according to his quote. So, it seems to me, at best, we can say that Hawking’s theory (known generally as a Quantum Gravity Model) is a mathematical exercise. Claiming that it proves the universe could come out of nothingness is going way, way out on a limb. It’s just not justified in any way. If Hawking’s model proves the possibility of ex nihilo creation without a creator, then Rudyard Kipling’s model proves how the leopard got it’s spots.

This is the first exception I take with the book. I’ll explore others in later posts.

It’s readily obvious when we look at the natural world that it’s particulars are meant for certain applications or activities. Like the character John says, “Milk does feed calves and dung does not.” Now this concept is an important one that regresses to greater ideas like intelligent design. It’s also a crucial point of connecting the material world with religious ideas. Indeed, this might be the crux of where the physical meets the metaphysical in human understanding.

Take homosexuality for example. The reason for rejecting it amongst religious and non-religious alike is a belief that it is “against nature” in some way. That phrase is tossed out a lot, and it simply means that engaging in homosexual acts is an abuse of the way the body was designed to work. Sex is a proper use of the body as it’s designed, but homosexuality is a use of the body in a way that violates it’s obvious design. It’s akin to feeding your calves dung instead of milk. You can claim all day long that they are both just secretions of a cow, but in a few days you’ll have a dead calf on your hands.

In short, the anthropological application of teleology brings an undertone of morality with it. It’s inescapable. Any time you bring oughtness into the philosophical mix, it’s going to require a judgement of the violation of what ought to be. That’s why I said earlier that teleology is the crux where physics and metaphysics meet. It also marks a turning point in this series of posts where I am taking simply theistic arguments to something more concrete about who that theistic personality may be.

His method is to introduce each literary work with a brief background about it’s author. You can tell pretty quickly that his understanding of church history is very robust and he comes at it from a highly orthodox view. This lends him a theological credibility that assures me that he is letting the author be who he was, rather than trying to “interperet” them into a modern form as is so often the case these days.

The book is divided into five epochs as follows:

This is one of those rare gems that should be in every Christian’s library. Most of us can’t afford to have a book for each one of these works in our library and even if we did we probably wouldn’t have time to read them. Yet we should all have a decent grasp of the major Christian writers in church history. This book is the answer to that dillema. Here is the link to it on Amazon. It makes a great Christmas gift.

Now take off your pointy ears for a second and put down your tri-corder. If you look at the “prime directive” from the perspective of a philosopher, you will recognize it instantly as a souped up version of cultural relativism. Nothing new here, but the reason I bring it up is because of how it relates to the problem of evil. The biggest stumbling block for many a non-believer is how a God could possibly exist, and yet let so much evil happen in the world. But these same people will frequently nod there head in agreement with something like the “prime directive” where the more advanced society is obligated to stay out of the affairs of developing societies at all costs. Indeed, some of the Star Trek writers themselves would probably quote the problem of evil to you in support of their atheism.

See the problem? You can’t hold to cultural relativism, and at the same time put forth the problem of evil. It’s a hypocrisy. But there is also something else. You could say that the “prime directive” is a nod to a sort of anthropological natural selection. It’s a recognition of a perceieved force at work in social development, and that force is reckoned to ultimately be a good thing. In a more general sense, it’s the thought that what’s best for a society comes from a pattern of non-interferance by outside forces. For example, Soviet Russia collapsed mainly from the inside – the result of much pain and hardship on the part of it’s people. And this was almost universally accepted as a good thing.

So silently, the fact that suffering, pain, hardship, etc. produces a unique fruit in the character of men and nations has been accepted in the minds of those that would hinge non-belief on the existance of evil. The fruit is sometimes bad but often times it is a more good fruit than what comes from those societies that don’t suffer hardship. It is a fact for instance that the Christian church expands and grows rapidly in those regions where it is most persecuted. I’m not saying that this is the way I would argue against the problem of evil as a rule. I’m just saying that this is one way it could be done in a society that has detente as one of it’s most noble ethics.

I could go on and on about the problems I see with Peart’s worldview, but this statement was a little surprising even for him. I have to wonder what he means by “this stuff is going on in both localities”. What exactly is “this stuff”? Nothing in my Christian faith gives me the slightest inclination to hate muslims. I’ll tell you what does give me the inclination to hate muslims though: when they chop American reporters and construction workers heads off. But that has nothing to do with my faith. If by “this stuff” he means “malevolent” faith then he is ignorant of the facts or just doesn’t want to see them. Equating a faith that prays for muslims to change with a faith that sends peoples heads home in baskets for changing is naive.

But here again, I just don’t understand why he is trying to equate strife between east and west with Christianity vs. Islam. When have we even heard Christianity mentioned in the whole middle eastern mess, except that time that the American state department stepped in to try and stop Afghanistan from executing a convert to Christianity. I don’t remember any such reciprocal action ever being needed.When he says “both would probably be insulted by the comparison” he is right. The difference is when the muslim mob in Europe and the middle-east get insulted they riot, kill cops, stab documentary film-makers to death in the street, blow up car bombs, etc. When Christians get insulted we just take it on the chin like we have been for the last 2000 years.

He goes on:

Here we go again with the same old refrain that some people “need” religion to make them feel better. Let’s see, what would make me feel better is polka-dotted fairies, so I think I’ll believe in them so I’ll indeed feel better. Like anyone believes in something they know is false just to make themselves feel better. That’s not just unadulterated arrogance. It’s impossible. You can’t believe in something you know is not true. That’s not how the human mind works Neil.

I generally stay away from people who set themselves up a notch higher than everyone else, based on some intellectualism. They are usually the biggest hypocrites you will meet. Neil speaks of “malevolent” faith, as if the ultimate good is just to be happy and nice to everyone without actually “believing” in anything. Yet, if you read his books, it becomes evident that he looks down his nose in judgement at half the population. My advice to that kind of person is just to go on and live your life how you want, and leave the moral judgements to those that don’t think of themselves too highly.

Here are some of his most notable scientific works/inventions:

He made many other contributions to the sciences such as rightly theorizing that a vaccum existed above the atmosphere. He made significant progress in mathematical probability theory with his colleague Pierre de Fermat. Philosophically, he’s also well known for what has come to be called Pascal’s Wager. In that vein, he was a deeply committed Christian. What was perhaps to become his most monumental written work, Pensees, was originally titled Defense of the Christian Religion. Here are some good quotes from Pascal:

And lest you think he was some sort of deist or something, the following was found written on a piece of cloth sewn inside his clothing after his death:

Maxwell was homeschooled as a young boy by his mother. His father was Presbyterian and his mother was Anglican. His mother died when he was 8 years old. His Christian faith only deepened as he went through his life. Here are a few quotes that I found from him:

When I read about people like Maxwell it makes me sad that modern science holds religion in such contempt. Maxwell saw perfect cohesion between his creator and the world around him. So much good is left on the table when one or the other is villified. He could confidently write a paper about the true structure of Saturn’s rings being made up of small solid objects(he was right by the way) and turn around and write a hymn like this:

For further reading about Maxwell, one of the best online resources can be found here. You can also check out his full biography here.