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Abortion: Open our eyes to what we are doing!

Thought this was encouraging.

Bertrand, Russell, a ruthlessly honest atheist

I find Bertrand Russell's honesty so incredibly refreshing if not depressing. Most of us, whether we are believers or unbelievers, lack the courage to follow our convictions to their logical ends.

If you don't believe in God, are you willing to embrace the despair of nihilism?

If you do, are you ready to embrace the fact that the God of the universe deserves not casual devotion, and a banal morality, but the passionate pursuit of your whole life? 

If you believe in Jesus as the Lord of the universe and the only way of salvation, are you ready to embrace it is as the most important, all consuming agenda on earth?

Even when you disagree, you have to admire those who believe what they believe with all their heart. I am challenged by Russell.

Bart Ehrman - Dinesh D'Souza debate @ UNC on "the Problem of Evil"

I have to admit that I was not all that pleased with the outcome of the Bart Ehrman-Dinesh D'Souza debate last night. I have enjoyed a number of D'Souza's writings, and am much more (obviously) in his camp, but don't feel that he well represented the biblical position on the problem of evil. Ehrman was at his best, raising all the right questions. I found D'Souza's answers mostly flat, unsatisfying, and not really representative of the biblical/Christian position.

(Parenthetically, I will note that I am not sure why D'Souza was the one chosen for this debate... there are a number of Christian theologians who have written incredible books on the problem of evil. D. A. Carson, William Lane Craig, NT Wright, Tim Keller, John Piper, and Bruce Little (at SEBTS)... just to name a few. I have never heard D'Souza as a "go to" guy for the problem of evil. Ehrman is one of our nation's leading critics; I'm not sure why he wasn't matched with someone who has written on the topic).

Ehrman raised a number of questions that went, for the most part, unanswered. Let me BRIEFLY (this is blog, not a book) sketch the beginnings of an answer to some of them, and point  you to some resources if you'd like to go deeper.

Why would a good God allow suffering? D'Souza's answer, for the most part, went back to God using suffering to teach us something. We could never develop virtue (compassion, courage, etc) without danger, pain, and suffering in the world.

This may be partially true, but it ignores the most fundamental reason why suffering exists: OUR COSMIC TREASON AND REJECTION OF GOD.

At one point, Ehrman said, indignantly, "I reject the idea that all this suffering, the holocaust, etc, was necessary just to create virtue in us." I had to sympathize with Ehrman's retort! Did God really create tsunamis just to teach us bravery? Was the massacre of thousands of Jewish children, and millions of unborn today, necessary just to make us compassionate? That's not convincing to me as a reason why a good God would allow evil.

Well, if not, why couldn't God create a world where suffering didn't exist?

Quite simply, He did. "Shalom" (peace, harmony) ruled God's world, our sin brought that crashing down. God is so fundamental to shalom that when we rejected Him and His order, the entire universe literally began to unravel. We rage against the idea that we are rightfully cursed because of our sin, but that is the plain biblical truth, as offensive as it is. We think this bad world is worse than we good people deserve. The Bible flips that on its head: if anything, any goodness in the world is better than we bad people deserve. Our rejection of God deserves ultimate condemnation. The fact that we woke up this morning, and the sun shone on our face, and we had food, friends, and love, is undeserved. God, in HIs mercy, is allowing us a space to repent. If we do not, we will face what we rightfully deserve: eternal suffering.

Jesus said as much in Luke 13:1-5. When asked why certain people died in a natural disaster, and whether the victims were deserving of what happened, Jesus said, "Not at all! In fact, unless you repent, you will all face the same judgment."

If we suffer because God allows us to have free will, how can there be no suffering in heaven? Do we not have free will there? Ehrman's question here was an attempt to challenge the assertion that our suffering is the result of our free will. This is not a really well thought out objection, in my opinion. Being free to do something doesn't mean that we automatically want to do it. As a grown man, I am "free" to eat rat dung or to jump off the Dean Dome in an attempt to fly. Though I am technically "free" to do either (i.e., if I could figure out how to get up on the Dean Dome), I probably will never choose either--so long as I retain my sanity and my good taste.

The Christian doctrine is that those in heaven are indeed free, but have been given a heart redeemed and purified by Christ, so that they would freely choose to avoid wickedness, perversion, injustice and sin because they abhor it like I do rat dung. Because they have been healed, they will not choose the insanity of sin any more than I would chose to jump off the Dean Dome.

Why then, you may ask, did Adam and Eve choose to sin in paradise, and how were they different than the people in heaven? That is a good question. A & E possessed less "sight" than we will have in heaven. They were given enough sight that they could have chosen God, by faith, if they wanted. Sadly, they (we) did not. In heaven, for those whom Jesus has rescued, our eyes will be opened sufficiently and our hearts accordingly changed that we would never choose the filth of sin any more than Ehrman would choose to eat his own children.

What is ironic is that Ehrman's point--again, that there can be free will without suffering--does not really help his case at all. Even he acknowledges that a lot of suffering does indeed rise out of free will. We all recognize that at times we use our freedom to hurt each other! So, then, how can we eliminate the suffering that arises from free will? There are only 2 options: external control (whereby you take away people's freedom so that they can't hurt others) or internal change (whereby they are changed so they wouldn't want to hurt people). The former answer is the answer of the dictator, attempted in the 20th century by Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao Tse Tung. The latter is the Christian answer, enacted by Jesus Christ 2000 years ago when He died on a cross to purchase our forgiveness and produce a change of heart). These are the only real two solutions--change imposed from the outside, or change beginning on the inside! I'd much prefer Jesus to Stalin on this.

I don't understand why the cross was the necessary way to save us, and why God doesn't just go ahead and stop all evil... I would have done it differently! Ehrman never said these exact words, but this is the undertone of much of what he said. Ehrman did say, "If God is good, then He would want purposeless evil to be stopped. If God is all powerful, then He could stop it. That evil exists proves the Christian God could not exist."

The hidden premise in this is that if there were a purpose in evil, Ehrman could perceive it, and if Ehrman can't perceive the purpose, then it must not exist. This is an extraordinary faith in his own powers of reasoning! This confidence, imho, is quite unfounded, if not illogical. Don't get me wrong, Ehrman is brilliant... but just think about it: if God is INFINITE in love, and INFINITE in power, does it now also follow He is INFINITE in wisdom? And if he is INFINITE in wisdom, and the magnitude of His wisdom exceeds ours as the magnitude of His power must exceed ours, does it not follow that there will be many things on earth we can't understand yet?

You can't have it both ways, Dr. Ehrman. If God is infinite in love and power, you have to concede He would be infinite in wisdom also. And if He is infinite in wisdom, of course there are things that your finite mind, though comparatively brilliant, cannot yet understand. Think about it: If God is as big as Christian doctrine teaches, and the immensity and complexity of creation demands, that He is, how could we possibly think we would understand all His purposes?

It's foolish to set ourselves up as the judge of the wisdom of God. That's like my 2 year old declaring herself the best judge of the political turmoil in Iran. Let's be temperate and rational about our own brilliance.

Is that unreasonable?

Where was God when the Holocaust was happening? Quite simply, He was on the cross. If the Christian revelation is true, then what was happening on the cross was truly staggering: the only ever truly innocent and perfect One died the most unjust and cruel death of all. Why? He was doing what was necessary to save us. Our sin requires any true salvation to do 2 things: Satisfy justice, and change our hearts to make us love the good. Jesus' death did both. In His death He satisfied the righteous wrath of God for our sin; in His resurrection He gave us the power of a new life.

Ironically, the best answer for the problem of evil for the night was given by Ehrman himself, when He said that the "historical" Jesus believed that through His Kingdom all wrongs would be put to right. That is exactly true. What Ehrman doesn't understand, or doesn't believe, is that our salvation required more than just a change of politics and circumstance. Jesus' Kingdom was not just a new regime. Jesus' Kingdom required a heart change and the removal of God's wrath.

Dr. Ehrman underestimates the damage our sin has caused to us, as well as the majesty of the God that was offended. He underestimates the true "sinfulness of sin"; how truly evil our evil really is. That's why, I think, He finds the Christian explanation for the cross so offensive.

Dr. Ehrman also believes that history proves that Jesus was mistaken in His hopes that a Kingdom of justice and righteousness would come. Almost 2000 years later, injustice still abounds! So how, Dr. Ehrman contends, could Jesus not be wrong in His hopes? But again, think about the size of God. 2000 years may look like a long time to us, but is it really that long for the Creator of the Universe, light years, black holes and string theory?

The weakest part of Dr. Ehrman's defense, and one I so wished D'Souza would have gone after, was Ehrman's very unsatisfying explanation about how he can call certain actions, like the Holocaust, truly evil. Ehrman said something about accountability to each other, but never really spelled out what me meant by that or WHY I need to feel accountable to anyone. If there is no God, then we might be able to say that certain actions are UNHELPFUL for the human race, but we can't ever say something is truly evil. To say something is morally evil requires that there be a higher good that you compare it to. The moment you say "This ought to be  different way," you have implied a higher standard, or a higher law, than what is. To say that actions are unjust requires that we have a higher law that tells us what justice is.

For all its philosophical wrangling, at the end of the day evolution cannot supply that law. Evolution can only explain what is, not what ought to be. You may say that is unhelpful for humanity to rape and for Hitler to murder the Jews. But that is not how evolution works. Each of us in in competition with others to have our genes replicated in future generations. If survival of the fittest is the predominant law of the universe, then our species is here and our genes are preserved because our genetic ancestors conquered and sometimes murdered their competitors. That's how survival of the fittest works.

Furthermore, Hitler, and many others, would have disagreed with you about what is "helpful" for the human race. Peter Singer, ethicist at Princeton, says that it is helpful for the human race to eliminate entirely retarded and disabled children from the gene pool. I say that even if you can prove its helpful for the gene pool, the slaughter of a 2 year old mentally challenged child is evil.

If our "morality" is determined simply by what the current majority of people think is helpful for the human race, then we are on shaky ground indeed. Martin Luther King decried the evil of racism by appealing to a law higher than majority opinion. At least for MLK, if there was no God, there would have been no civil rights movement. If there is no Law Giver, there can be no true evil.

At the end of the day, I find blind, atheistic evolution a very unsatisfying answer to my deepest questions. Nothing x nobody = everything? Really? Hitler just died and faces the same future as Mother Theresa? The smothering of a 6 month old by a drunk parent is unhelpful, but not evil? When a parent buries a 4 year old killed in a car wreck, that's it--life is over altogether?

Dr. Ehrman's rather facile "kum ba yah" passage from his book that he read at the end of the debate I find VERY unsatisfying. I'll stick with Nietzsche and Richard Dawkins as MUCH more consistent agnostic/atheists than Dr. Ehrman. They are not afraid to follow their logic to its despairing end.

*****
Again, these are just the beginnings of an answer. I hope I have not been too hard on Mr. D'Souza. I have a great deal of respect for him, and appreciate his time and spirit in coming, as well as his wittiness and brilliance and passion.

I would appeal, however, to the Christian Apologetics Association to choose a more suitable "opponent" when setting up these debates. D'Souza is as smart as Dr. Ehrman, but this is just not the area of his expertise.

For those of you who really want to go deeper in this, I would commend to you Tim Keller's book The Reason for God or D. A. Carson's How Long O Lord? for starters.

Here are a few free messages, one by Dr. Tim Keller (pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan) and two 1 2 by yours truly that might also be good to download and listen to. If you're only going to do one, do Tim Keller's.

For those of you reading who are/were truly troubled by all this, please know that I or any of the pastors at the Summit Church would love to talk with you about this or anything on your heart...

Links-o-rama

Thought I'd share a few things with you...

• John Piper's church's statement about their conviction and compassion on homosexuality. Very good
• John Piper offers some thoughts on the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America's consideration of whether or not to allow openly gay clergy in their denomination--a loving warning about the danger of casting off Biblical guidelines because of the fear of man. One of the reports I listened to about this on NPR featured a gay clergyman proudly boasting that if they didn't get it passed this year, they will just wear the conservatives down. One gets the image of Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table at the UN saying to the US, "we will bring you down without ever firing a gun." "Why do you boast, oh evil man? The goodness of the Lord endures forever." (Ps 52:1).
• At a much different speed, some of you wonder who does a lot of our videography/design at the Summit. One of the guys on our team, Jonathan Edwards, has his own site here, and they're even giving away an i-phone in a little contest they're running.
• Al Mohler has written couple of interesting articles of late on the case for early marriage, Christian missions in the 21st century and the new 'culture of offendedness'.

The logic of creation for a 6 year old

This past weekend, driving in our car, Kharis asked me why some people don’t believe in God (a friend's dad is an outspoken atheist).

Me: “Well, even though it seems obvious to us, some people look at all these things--the flowers, trees, seeds, oceans--and they think that God didn’t create it."

Kharis: “Well, how do they think it all got here?”

Me: "They think there was a big bang, and out of the big bang all the stuff we see comes from that."

Kharis: "Well... who do they think stuffed all that stuff into the bang? And how do they think it all just plopped into the right places?"

I love it, because even my 6 year old (perhaps especially my 6 year old) can see the glaring problem in even the most sophisticated of scientific theories. A. If you posit that there is no God you must assume the eternality of a matter...and that is a huge, mostly ignored problem by most atheists. B. The evidence points to the priority of information--even when you allow liberally for natural selection, you have glaring evidences of some kind of intelligence that directs matter's development, rather than matter somehow just getting smarter.

Even to a 6 year old, saying "Nothing x nobody = everything" is a stretch. Thinking on how she sees what many PhD's can no longer see, I couldn't help but think of the verse in Romans, "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools."

Why to Not Watch TV?

Thought this was a great, very enlightening, and convicting article by John Piper on the dangers of television. To note: this is not another tirade against the teletubbies. This has some serious reflection in it for believers at all stages of life.

Superman on ethics

Heard this statement made by the late Christopher Reeve to students at Yale the year before he died: “When matters of public policy are debated religion should not have a seat at the table.”

I want you to think for a minute about the absolute incoherence of that statement. How can we talk about any dimension of morality and not have a "religious commitment?" Everything we say about what is right or wrong is based on "religious" assumptions we make about human nature, even if we are not religious. To say that human beings have rights is based on the assumption that there is something special about a human being that separates a human from a cow. That is a religious assumption, and one that many Hindus do not share. To say that all races are equal is built on the assumption that the human beings are, in essence, the same, and thus have rights regardless of their educational status, wealth, or skin color. That is a religious assumption, and one that the Nazis and other white supremacists do not share.

Furthermore, secularism is its own religion. A secularist says, “The only things we can know must be scientifically proven.” The problem is that statement can’t itself be scientifically proven! That statement is itself a credo statement arising from the a priori belief that there is a) not a God who reveals Himself beyond scientific data and that science is thus the only way to knowledge and b) the belief that our minds are capable to accurately perceive the truth that is out there. These are faith assumptions.

David Klingenhoffer, a Jewish secularist said this in the LA Times... I find it quite insightful: "What we are observing in our society appears to be the struggle of religion against no religion. In actuality, it is the conflict of various religions, including secularism. If you object, saying that secularism is not a religion because it has no deity, let's remember that other religions, like Zen Buddhism, also lack belief in a god. What is a religion then? Simply this: a system of beliefs explaining where life comes from; what life means; and what we human beings must be doing with our few allotted years. Answers to these questions are not provable, they are taken on faith."

It is impossible to talk about the world, morality, and even science without bringing some faith assumptions to the table. What is not fair is to say that only you can bring yours.

The Truth About Angels and Demons

For you blog-o-philes... they are running a series of posts that Mike McDaniel and I worked on together on theresurgence.com (the Acts 29 network, led by Mark Driscoll). They asked us to write about our vision philosophy and ministry at the Summit... visit it, and they'll think we have a lot of readers :)

Here's a great website with some reflections and fact-checking about the new film based on Dan Brown's novel, Angels and Demons. As you may know, the movie raises the decades old straw man argument that all those who believe the Bible have to blind themselves from the real, immutable source of knowledge, science. It is certainly true that some Christians are (shamefully) anti-intellectual. But to say that all Christians are anti-intellectual just because a few of them are is just good, old-fashioned, lynch-style bigotry.

This would be a great website to which to direct friends you have that watched the movie and have questions...

You Don't Change What It is by Changing the Name

I'm not trying to be controversial... but this is prophetic and one thing that we must stand for, even if it makes us insanely unpopular. It was talking this way that caused John the Baptist to get his head cut off, and caused Elijah to be hunted down by Ahab. God give us courage to say what we must say, the humility to say it without judgmentalism, and the love to speak up for the weak. Here's another one by Bono, talking about our obligation to the poor of the world.

Adoption

Thought this was great...