Clarke Morledge -- Computer Network Engineer, College of William and Mary...
I hiked the Mount of the Holy Cross, one of the famous Colorado Fourteeners, with some friends in July, 2012. My buddy, Mike Scott, snapped this photo of me on the summit.
I want to go on record and say that statements like these make me cringe. I can understand when it can be confusing when we run into evidence from science and history that contradict certain ways of reading the Bible. But it becomes clearly absurd when straight-forward mathematics are involved.
Sure, I was a mathematics major in college, so I could be a little prejudiced here. But with all due respect to Pastor LaRuffa, I am not persuaded that this is quite what the Lord has in mind with respect to the authority of God’s Word. Continue reading
Molly Worthen says that there is a “crisis of authority” within the evangelical church today. What authority holds the evangelical movement together: a commitment to Biblical inerrancy, a common “born-again” experience, a shared vision for the transformation of culture, or something else?
Apostles of Reason is an intellectual history of the evangelical Christianity movement over the past 70 years or so, sprinkled with fascinating portraits of influential Christian thinkers, activists, and preachers. But it seeks to make some major corrections. First, many critics in our culture today dismiss evangelical faith as simply a form of anti-intellectualism. Consider the recent Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate. In the popular mind, this pitted a secular, science-affirming worldview against an entrenched dogmatism incapable of change and meaningful intellectual engagement.
Worthen finds this assessment to be entirely incorrect. Instead, Worthen finds evangelical Christianity to be highly rational and intellectual. The problem is that evangelical Christianity does not play by the rules of secular academia. The secular world evaluates truth in terms of an adherence to a scientific method and the embrace of vetted peer review among educated colleagues.
Popular evangelical thought, on the other hand, bypasses much of this encumbrance by taking the message of a fully sound and rationalistically reliable Christian message straight to the people. Far from being “anti-science”, as in the case of the “creationism” debate, evangelical Christians see themselves as simply building upon what the famous 19th century Princeton theologian, Charles Hodge, saw as the “storehouse of facts” that are found within the Bible, accessible to anyone who can read. There is no need to be a “Bible scholar” to discover God’s Truth as found in Scripture. Just read the Bible for yourself! To the frustrations of the Bill Nyes of this world, Christians are making an appeal to an infallible authority that transcends both the limitations of a modernistic, falsely optimistic belief in science to solve all problems on the one side and a postmodern cultural relativism that has no unified vision of ethics and meaning on the other.
But what is the nature of this infallible authority? This question really gets to the heart of Worthen’s thesis. Continue reading
In Why Evolution is True, biologist and atheist Jerry Coyne seeks to drive a wedge between intelligent design and NeoDarwinian evolution, favoring the latter. But what if the Bible and “real world” engineering both make a case that there is less of a contrast than what Coyne would have us believe? Would a little imagination from an engineer help?
When God created the world did He do so as a Master Engineer or as a Tinkerer?
I recently finished listening to an audiobook by Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago biologist, and vocal critic of Christian interpretations of science. In Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne is making the argument that the biological theory of evolution rules out the possibility of Intelligent Design. Evolution does not reflect the divine activity of a Creator. According to Coyne, the biological world does not resemble the work of someone creating things from scratch. Instead, the evolutionary process demonstrates the work of tinkering; that is, working with a limitation of available parts, experimenting at putting together different solutions. Tinkering is not very efficient, nor does it always produce the most beneficial results, hardly becoming the activity of a Divine Creator. But for Coyne, this tinkering is exactly what NeoDarwinian evolution is all about… and it is true.
Jerry Coyne did his undergraduate work at the College of William and Mary, finishing in the 1970’s. I currently work at William and Mary as a network engineer. Coyne is a superbly skilled scientist, but I need to respond to him as an engineer. Continue reading
A friend of mine asked me today if I knew someone doing evangelical work by the name of Nabeel Qureshi. I vaguely recalled the name, and doing a little digging on the Internet discovered that Nabeel Qureshi had grown up in his high school years in Virginia Beach, Virginia in a Muslim family. My friend’s older brother was at one time very good friends with Nabeel. Nabeel would come over and visit and play video games. My friend recalls Nabeel leaving the house terribly frustrated because he kept losing all of the time.
Nabeel’s father was a member of a persecuted Islamic sect in Pakistan who brought his family to America for the purposes of religious freedom. In gratitude to the opportunities given to him in the United States, Nabeel’s father joined the Navy, eventually bringing his son and the rest of the family with him to the Virginia Beach area. According to his story,Nabeel described himself as being a very devout Muslim.
An aside: I would like to know if his religious parents had let him play video games or if he just snuck out some nights to play on an Xbox or whatever (rather badly) at his friend’s house, but that will be something to talk about if I ever meet Nabeel…
Anyway, by the time Nabeel entered his freshman year at Old Dominion University (ODU) in Norfolk, Virginia, he thought of himself as a fairly competent Muslim evangelist. Sincere Christians would come up to him and ask him if he knew that Jesus was God. Nabeel was well equipped to respond and demonstrated that the average Christian had absolutely no clue how to respond to his logical argument that Christian belief was nonsensical and could not even be supported by the Bible. No Christian he ever met could provide a satisfactory explanation of the Trinity. It all sounded ridiculous to him.
Christians simply could not answer his questions…
That is, until he met a sophomore named David Wood. Unlike most Christians he had met, Nabeel found David at one point reading his Bible in his free time. Furthermore, David had actually studied apologetics. So when Nabeel tried to stump David with how corrupt the Bible really was, David responded with much of the same arguments that my fellow co-blogger John Paine knows about regarding the reliability of the Bible.
Nabeel had met his match. He and David became fast friends and they looked at the claims of the Bible and the Qu’ran together. Through their debates with one another, it was their friendship that kept things in check as they learned and shared a lot of hard things with each other. Eventually, Nabeel’s mind was opened to Christianity, but he was fearful about the cost. After experiencing a vision and several incredible dreams, Nabeel finally gave himself over to Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.
Some ten years later, despite the terrible costs to him and his family, Nabeel Qureshi has dedicated himself to the ministry of Christian apologetics, particularly engaging in debates with Islamic apologists. Apparently, Muslims who are motivated by their own missionary interests love debates. These debates can get testy at times, but I find that the interchange of ideas and arguments have challenged me to dig deeper in the Bible myself so that I might be better prepared to answer the type of questions that Nabeel had back in his college days at ODU. As Nabeel has matured in recent years, he has also done some teaching with some introductory videos on Islam and at Biola University, where he received his masters in Christian apologetics.
In his testimony, Nabeel tells about witnessing a debate between Mike Licona and Shabir Ally about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, held about ten years ago at Regent University. This debate helped convince Nabeel of the intellectual integrity of the Gospel message. Shabir Ally is one of the most engaging Islamic debaters today, very well liked by his Christian counterparts, despite their differences. Mike Licona is probably one of my favorite Christian apologists today, ably defending the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a winsome way. If you live in or near Williamsburg, Virginia, we hope that there might be a great opportunity to see Mike Licona in action with Lee Strobel and Mark Mittelburg within a few months (stay tuned for that). I highly recommend Mike.
My wife and I were still out making our monthly run to CostCo while last night’s debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye was going on. It was not like the SuperBowl or anything, but somewhere between a half a million to a million people watched the YouTube version online.
I only caught the closing statements near the end and rewinded to the beginning to catch their opening statements. I actually thought the exchange went better than I thought it would, and it did turn out a little different than I expected and predicted here on Veracity.
Instead of focusing on the harm evolution education he reports is causing in our schools, Ken Ham focused more on the distinction he was making between historical science and observational science. His main argument was that he and Bill Nye actually share the same perspective on observational science that gives us things like modern technology today. The disagreement is over historical science. For Bill Nye, historical science gives us genuine knowledge about the past. For Ken Ham, science can not give us reliable knowledge about the past. We must look to the Bible for that.
Likewise, Bill Nye surprised me, too. Though he clearly has an agnostic orientation towards the Christian faith, he made some approving mention that not all Christians share Ken Ham’s Young Earth Creationist views.
