Thoughts on ethics, society, politics, religion, philosophy, theology, and everything in between
Miracles: Evidence for the Supernatural (3-part series) The Historical Case for the Resurrection of Jesus The Problem of Evil (4-part series) Foundations (5-part series) Participating in the Story of Scripture The Story of the Gospel and the Story of My Life Foundations of Christian Ethics (3-part series) Religion, Violence, and the State The Politics of … Read more
Evangelicalism is a renewal movement within Protestant Christianity which arose from the eighteenth-century revival movements of John Wesley and George Whitefield. Committed to historic Christian orthodoxy, evangelicalism has four main characteristics: biblicism (affirming the supreme Authority of Scripture), conversionism (affirming the need for personal conversion to following Jesus in order to be saved), activism (affirming … Read more
“Verily there is that which is more contrary to Christianity, and to the very nature of Christianity, than any heresy, any schism, more contrary than all heresies and all schisms combined, and that is, to play Christianity.” – Soren Kierkegaard Over 50 years ago, sociologist Philip Rief’s insightful work The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses … Read more
At one of my previous churches, the congregation held a lengthy discernment process regarding whether we should change the church’s moral teachings about a particular sin. Throughout this process, the two words that people repeated again and again were the words “welcoming” and “inclusion.” In spite of the fact that no one was able to … Read more
The ethical status of homosexual behavior continues to be one of the most controversial theological issues in the Western Church. Some denominations adopt an “affirming” position and give their blessing on same-sex marriages, other denominations hold firmly to the traditional position, and other denominations divide and split over the issue. I have already discussed the … Read more
Before examining what Jesus and the apostles have to say about the topic of homosexuality, we should first examine the teachings of the Old Testament on the topic, since this provides the background for understanding what the New Testament authors have to say about it. There are two Old Testament texts which explicitly forbid homosexual … Read more
The Fine-Tuning of the Universe We live in an orderly universe which operates according to certain fundamental laws of physics. The current state of the universe results from a combination of the constants of these physical laws and the initial conditions of the universe, which include: the strong nuclear force, the electro-magnetic force constant, the … Read more
In my last post, I discussed how the findings of modern science support the idea that the universe began to exist, and how this provides support for the Kalam Cosmological Argument for God’s existence: Now, science cannot prove absolutely that the universe began to exist. But even if we set aside scientific evidence that the … Read more
One common argument for the existence of God, developed by Medieval Muslim philosophers, is known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument. In its basic form, it runs as follows: The only way to avoid this argument’s conclusion is to claim that the universe is eternal, and so never began to exist. Indeed, many atheists have claimed … Read more
Proving God’s Existence In this final series in my year of apologetics posts on this blog, I will make some philosophical arguments for God’s existence. I have deliberately saved this topic for last, in order to avoid giving the impression that one must first become convinced by philosophical arguments that the god of the philosophers … Read more