withallyourmind.net

Last evening, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by Dr. Hugh Ross, of Reasons To Believe, at the All Saints Episcopal Church in Lakeland, Florida. Dr. Ross was quite informative and entertaining. I find it interesting that he seems to distance himself from the intelligent design movement in general.

He began his lecture with a critique of what is wrong with the ID movement. He believes that his organization’s approach is more fundamentally sound than that of the ID movement we here about in the news all the time. His problem with the ID movement is that it needs to be “more religious” than it is. According to Dr. Ross, the reason ID is resisted in education is because they are not willing to identify the designer. He believes that to make inroads into the public education system we need to identify the designer as Jesus Christ and show how the Bible supports this claim.

I find it hard to believe that this approach has any chance to be successful. I believe Dr. Ross is mistaken when he states that the reason ID is meeting with so much resistance is because it is not religious enough. More likely, ID is encountering opposition because it has the best chance to unseat Darwinism from its sacred seat atop naturalistic science.

After the meeting, I spent a few moments talking with a geologist who works with the RTB organization. I asked what seemed to me the obvious question regarding their approach: “If the RTB approach is better, why is this not taught in public education? Why are we not hearing about their approach in the news?” The unsatisfactory answer was, “It’s because this is so new”.

Don’t misunderstand. I think what Dr. Ross and his colleagues are doing is admirable. Their purpose is to discover how the latest scientific discoveries identify the God of the Bible as the designer. Once one realizes that there is unmistakeable evidence for a designer, it is only natural to want to discover who that designer is. I don’t believe the science classroom is the place for that discussion, however. There are many other places where that is appropriate.

I believe RTB and the ID movement at large can peacefully coexist, both making their own important contributions. RTB contributing to the realm of science and Christian apologetics. Intelligent Design, leaving religious belief to others, contributing to science itself.

    There has been a storm brewing in some of the blogs I read often about cessationalism and the sign gifts, and perhaps against my better judgement, I’ve decided to give some of my own thoughts on the matter. To start off, I consider myself to be reformed in theology, and I also consider myself to be a charismatic (meaning only that I don’t believe the miraculous gifts have necessarily ceased - a view not to be associated with the popular charismatic view of pentecostalism). Nevertheless, I don’t particularly like the argumentation I’ve seen on either side of the issue. The whole debate started at Philip Johnson’s blog when he posted a series of blogs about “prophetic utterances gone bad” that he claims were never meant to be arguments for cessationalism in the first place, but it looks like he couldn’t escape throwing out in this post what seems to be the most common argument against the charismatic view: “So here’s my challenge to those continuationists who insist that the problem of bogus prophecies pales in importance compared to the exegetical issues raised by cessationism: Name one faithful modern prophet whose prognostications are both objectively verifiable and always one-hundred percent accurate. Because that is the biblical standard (Deuteronomy 18:20-22).” Let me try to clarify and examine this explicit argument and the one arguably implicit in his earlier posts.
    The argument seems to be something like this:

1. I don’t know anyone who can be considered a prophet by biblical standards, and I’m willing to bet you don’t either.
2. Therefore, there aren’t any “prophets” who meet biblical standards for prophecy.
3. Therefore, prophecy and the sign gifts have ceased.

     When written this way, it doesn’t seem promising. There are many people who would reject the first premise and claim to know prophets that meet Deuteronomy’s standards. I don’t know any and would be willing accept the first premise. However even with this granted, it is clear that the second premise doesn’t follow logically from the first. This is a clear example of the fallacy of argument from ignorance. Nevertheless, let’s accept for the sake of argument premise 2. But wait, premise 3 doesn’t follow either! Even if we grant it as a fact that there hasn’t been a single prophet or person with any of the other gifts for the last 1700 years or so, cessationalism as Philip Johnson defines it wouldn’t be true - the only thing that would be true is that God hasn’t bestowed these gifts upon anyone recently. This objection obviously won’t work.
    Another common argument deals with the closure of the canon and goes something like this (see here for example):

1. If the canon of Scripture is closed then the sign gifts have ceased.
2. The canon of Scripture is closed.
3. Therefore, the sign gifts have ceased.

    This argument, at least, is valid. I don’t think it is sound though. I grant premise 2, but not premise 1. I have simply never seen any compelling reason to believe the first premise. I believe firmly in Sola Scriptura, that the Bible is the only authority on matters of faith, the nature of God and man, salvation, and doctrine in general. But I fail to see how this is inconsistent with God working through a man to perform a miraculous healing or speak a true prophecy as a sign to unbelievers (and believers). Others offer scriptural prooftexts for premise 1 that I have found in the very least extremely strained and a dissapointment when compared to the rich tradition of sound exegesis of reformed theologians (perhaps I’ll address these later). I’m left then with no reason to accept this argument either.
    Nevertheless, I also want to distance myself from the views of people like Adrian Warnock who argues that NT (and current) prophecy is not meant to be infallible and therefore doesn’t need to submit to the regulations of Deut. 18:20-22. Again, I see no reason to believe this other than a desire to accomodate false prophecies. The person who thinks that perhaps maybe he is a prophet is unknown to the biblical record and the possibility of the Holy Spirit speaking a lie through someone seems plainly contradictory. Adrian uses verses like 1 Thess 5:19-21 “Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good” as evidence that prophecies are not infallible. But all that the verse seems to say to me is to test what people claiming to be prophets say. Test them for what? What seems to make the most sense is to test them for accuracy. If their prophecies are false then they aren’t true prophets! (See also Jollyblogger’s detailed response to Warnock)
    I think the problem that both sides have (at least in the way they argue) can be seen at this point - they both want to put experience above the Bible. I think Deuteronomy’s test for prophecy is still valid and I will freely admit that I don’t know even a single person who I would consider to exemplify any of the NT sign gifts (precisely for the reason that they don’t match the biblical precedent). That being said, I also have no reason (biblical or otherwise) to think that these gifts are not active or to believe that God cannot or will not use them now or at any other time. I am therefore a charismatic exactly and only as Warnock defines it in his post - someone who is not a cessationalist.

(Disclaimer: I hope nothing I wrote will be seen as an attack on anyone referred to. I have the utmost respect for everyone mentioned and humbly admit that my theological knowledge in general is small in comparison to theirs. I’m also willing to admit that I may have misunderstood something or am mistaken in my views - I only wish for any view to satisfy the requirement of convincing “by Scripture and by plain reason.” I’m also not sure where my father stands on this issue although I think he holds a view similar to my own. At any rate, the thoughts contained in this blog are mine alone.)

The New York Times has claimed that the state of Kansas has redefined science. I hardly think so. Taken outside of the ID debate, if one were to walk up to most any scientist and ask him if the following is a good explanation of what science is, the vast majority would have no problem with it:

Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory-building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.

What is it about the preceding definition that is offensive or lacking? Nothing, if you ask the other 40 states whose definition is essentially identical to that of Kansas (Nine states have no definition, at all). The definition scuttled by the state of Kansas was the only one which stated specifically that only natural explanations could be sought. The charge that Kansas is redefining science is blatantly false.

The definition recently adopted by the Kansas state board of education should be objectionable to no one. Science is about logically applying the scientific method to reach the best explanation of how things are. It is not about prejudging certain possible outcomes by excluding them from consideration from the beginning.

Those who claim ID will destroy science and make Americans scientifically illiterate will have a hard time convincing most folks based on the above definition. Allowing the possibility of intelligent design does not change the way science is done. Scientists do not clean out their labs and pack up their belongings and become theologians. They continue doing science, testing all theories and hypotheses, not willing to state as fact what they cannot support with verifiable evidence, and not willing to insist that evidence must conform to a certain philosophical viewpoint (i.e. naturalism). For a list of the various state definitions, see here.

I was sitting in our Sunday morning worship service this past week, singing the following chorus:

You’re all I want.
You’re all I ever needed.
You’re all I want.
Help me know You are near.

As I sang, I couldn’t help but stop and ask myself, “Can I really sing this song?”. Could anyone truly sing that song? Should we scratch that song from our worship repertoire? Can I honestly say that God is all I want? There seems to be a part of me that says, “Yes! You are all I want!” Then there is the part of me that is present with me throughout every day, as I want more and more things. The Christmas season is around the corner when people will be asking others, “What do you want for Christmas?” Is He all we want?

I don’t think it is necessarily wrong for us to sing that song. I’m reminded of the man who cried out to Jesus, “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.” I think we need to say in our hearts, “Lord, you are all I want. Help me to want only you.” It is comforting to be able to say to God that we even need Him to help us want Him. In ourselves, we truly cannot sing that song. But by confessing our total dependence on God, even for the desire for Him, we bring Him glory through our worship.

Heavenly Father, help me to want You more and things less. Amen.

Here’s a little poem I wrote a couple weeks ago to recite in the morning as a prayer to start my day.

Father in heaven, be with me today,
watch o’er what I do, what I think, and say.
Impress on my mind, and let me observe
how wonderful is the God that I serve.
Show me your glory, in sky and on land,
give me a heart to keep your commands.
Let me not forget, nor think little of,
Your Son’s sacrifice, his sorrow and love.
Conform me to Him, O let me be driven,
to love with the love, and grace that was given.

William A. Dembski, in The Design Revolution, states, “The mark of an ideology is triumphalism, the illusion that success is inevitable.” He then goes on to talk about naturalism being the worst offender. Naturalist ideologues believe that their science will prevail over everything that does not succumb to their methods. Religion, God, souls, and especially Intelligent Design will make a hasty retreat as the truth marches on.

The real truth about science, however, is that it is always subject to revision. He states:

Science is an interconnected web of thoretical and factual claims about the world that are constantly being revised and for which changes in one portion of the web can induce radical changes in another. In particular, science regularly confronts the problem of having to retract claims that it once boldly asserted.

Dembski provides the geosynclinal theory as an example of how science must regularly backtrack. This theory proposed that “large troughlike depressions, known as geosynclines, filled with sediment, gradually became unstable, and then, when crushed and heated by the earth, elevated to form mountain ranges.” The 1960 edition of Geological Evolution of North America contained this assessment of geosynclinal theory:

The geosynclinal theory is one of the great unifying principles in geology. In many ways its role in geology is similar to that of the theory of evolution, which serves to integrate the many branches of the biological sciences…Just as the doctrine of evolution is universally accepted among biologists, so also the geosynclinal origin of the major mountain systems is an established principle in geology.

Within 10 years of this statement, scientists had pretty much abandoned it altogether. The theory of plate techtonics decisively replaced it. The great unifying theory of Darwinian evolution is no more sacred than the geosynclinal theory of mountain range formation.

Not all theories need to be totally discarded. Dembski offers the example of Newtonian physics as an example. Newtonian theory is still taught today. Originally, it was felt to provide a total account of how the universe works. Then Maxwell, Einstein, and Heisenberg each showed this was not true. Newtonian mechanics works well for medium-sized objects going at medium speeds, but breaks down with very small or very fast objects. Dembski draws an appropriate conclusion for Darwinism:

So too, the proper domain of the Darwinian selection mechanism is far more constricted than most Darwinists would like to admit. In particular, large-scale evolutionary changes in which organisms gain novel information-rich structures cannot legitimately be derived from the Darwinian selection mechanism.

Darwinism continues to function as an ideology which refuses to admit its shortcomings. In so doing, it does a discredit to the science it purports to uphold.

STR’s Greg Koukl has a new article at their website, called Evil as Evidence for God. Jeremy posted a blog on this website last month covering the same topic. Both are excellent reads.

I submit an excerpt of Greg’s article here:

The argument against God based on the problem of evil can only be raised if some form of moral objectivism is true. Morals, therefore, exist. I need not give a complete taxonomy of ethical guidelines to make my case. If there is even one moral absolute, it invites the question, “What kind of world view explains the existence of this moral rule?”

Atheism can’t make any sense of it. Neither can most Eastern religions. If reality is an illusion, as they hold, then the distinction between good and evil is ultimately rendered meaningless. Something like the Judeo-Christian or Muslim idea of God must be true to adequately account for moral laws.

    Perhaps the most common conception of the mind by those who don’t believe in anything like an immaterial soul is that it is basically just an extremely complex computer. When it is given certain inputs, it will give various corresponding outputs in accordance with its internal state, it can store and receive data, etc. People who hold a view like this toward the mind generally also believe in the possibility of strong artificial intelligence - the thesis that a suitably programmed computer will not only imitate mentality, but will actually have mentality. It is not hard to see why this is an attractive theory, but I invite everyone to consider a thought experiment given by philosopher John Searle that highlights the intuitions a lot of people have about why a computer is not and never could be a mind (and vice versa). It is called the “Chinese Room.” I’m going to quote the whole thing directly from Jaegwon Kim’s explanation in his Philosophy of Mind (2nd edition, 2006).

Searle invites us to imagine a room - the “Chinese room” - in which someone (say, Searle himself) who understands no Chinese is confined. He has a set of rules for systematically transforming strings of symbols to yield further symbol strings. These symbol strings are in fact Chinese expressions, and the transformation rules are purley formal in the sense that their application depends solely on the shapes of the symbols involved, not their meanings. So you can apply these rules without knowing any Chinese; all that is required is that you recognize Chinese characters by their shapes. Searle becomes very adept at manipulating Chinese expressions in accordance with the rules given to him (we may suppose that Searle has memorized the whole rule book) so that every time a string of Chinese characters is sent in, Searle goes to work and promptly sends out an appropriate string of Chinese characters. From the perspective of someone outside the room who understands Chinese, the input strings are questions in Chinese and the output strings sent out by Searle are appropriate responses to these questions. The input-output relationships are what we would expect if someone wiht a genuine understanding of Chinese, instead of Searle, were locked inside the room. And yet Searle does not understand any Chinese, and there is no understanding of Chinese going on anywhere inside the Chinese room. What goes on in the room is only manipulation of symbols on the basis of their shapes, or “syntax” but real understanding involves “semantics,” knowing what those symbols represent, or mean. Although Searle’s behavior is input-output equivalent to that of a speaker of Chinese, Searle understands no Chinese (145).

    He goes on to say that you could replace Searle with a computer that does the same thing, and obviously there would still be no real understanding of Chinese. What this experiment captures is the fact that a computer, by definition, only deals with syntax. It is given a set of 1s and 0s and based on these, gives back another set of 1s and 0s that are translated into something else. But the computer neither knows that it is given 1s and 0s nor what is represented by these 1s and 0s. This is not how the mind works, however. Human persons may use language that is syntactic, but what makes them have minds is that they go beyond the syntax and understand the semantics.

I was reading George Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Phylonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists, today. Berkeley (pronounced Barkley, as in Charles), 1685-1753, was an Ango-Irish clergyman and philosopher. In Three Dialogues, one of his most well-known pieces, Phylonous is teaching Hylas his philosophical principles of idealism. In the second dialogue (third edition), after Hylas has misconstrued an argument made by Phylonous, Phylonous makes the following assertion:

Few men think; yet all have opinions. Hence men’s opinions are superficial and confused.

As part of our duty to love God with all of our minds, comes the necessity of thinking well. In addition, part of our duty to evangelize our world and to introduce others to the Gospel is to encouarage others to think well. So many spout off opinions about abortion, homosexuality, morality, the existence of God, world religions, etc., but few think critically about their positions. It is the purpose of this website to assist others in thinking well. There are other sites (see, blogs we frequent) that do the same.

My hope and prayer is that more and more Christians will take the time to learn to think well. Too often we are lazy and are content to regurgitate what we have been told by others. All Christians must learn to think for themselves by learning basics of logic and by understanding how to recognize fallacious reasoning when exposed to it. Reason, or thinking well, is not to replace faith or Scripture with reason. It is not a replacement for God’s word, but a God-given faculty enabling us to rightly understand and use His word. We are susceptible to all kinds of beliefs if we do not know how to think critically (As is evidenced by the beliefs of some).

The Christian Mind website has, as its heading, the following quote by Harry Blamires:

If Christians cannot communicate as thinking beings, they are reduced to encountering one another only at the shallow level of gossip and small talk. Hence the perhaps peculiarly modern problem - the loneliness of the thinking Christian.

I was reading the recent series by Mark D Roberts on a contested sermon by George Regas, a minister at the All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. The sermon has placed in jeopardy the tax-exempt status of that church because of the political content found therein. My purpose is not to discuss the controversy regarding whether or not the Rev. Regas violated the rules concerning supporting particular candidates. I found in Regas’ message an oft quoted criticism of conservatives, that of giving tax cuts for “the rich” at the expense of the poor:

And in the midst of [the poor getting a bad deal], President Bush asks and gets income tax reductions where 50% of the tax savings goes to the top 1% of the wealthiest Americans, those averaging $1,200,000 a year in income

Part of the effort of the liberal politicians of our day is to try to regain the religious vote by focusing on issues they believe are Christian, moral themes. One of these is caring for the poor and disadvantaged. They are quite correct when ascribing this imperative to Christianity. A seeming multitude of scripture instructs us to care for the poor, the fatherless, the widowed, i.e., the disadvantaged.

However, the liberal left errs when they think higher taxation of some to help others is a scriptural concept. The scripture teaches that one’s giving is to be of his own free will and with a cheerful heart. Taxation more resembles theft than true Christian giving. It is the forcible taking away of one’s property by another party to give to others. I don’t imagine most folks would think very kindly of someone stealing a proportion of their income each week to give to the poor. It is as unbiblical to take forcibly from others as it is to neglect those who are in need.

I think Americans are among the most giving people in the world, and I think that Christians, as a whole, are perhaps the most giving Americans. They certainly believe in helping the poor. Raising taxes, forcibly removing wealth from some, to give to others is immoral. Because one opposes this practice does not make him unconcerned for the disadvantaged, nor immoral. Forced giving is not a biblical concept at all.

2 Corinthians 9:7 (ESV) Each one must give as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.