What do students need to flourish as Christ-followers in college and beyond? I answer that question and more in this podcast.
Category Archives: Culture
Is Intelligent Design Science?
In this helpful video, Dr. Stephen Meyer explains the nature of science and then unpacks the definition of intelligent design. There is a lot of confusion about this point and I hope you find this video helpful. You can find out more about Dr. Meyer’s excellent book here.
If you are new to this whole discussion about Science, Evolution, and Intelligent Design and would like an accesible introduction, this is one of the best places to start:
I’ve found the empirical evidence for ID to be impressive and I think it poses a legitimate challenge to Darwinian Evolution. What questions do you have about intelligent design and evolution? Ask them here and we will discuss them in future posts. Have you found this blog helpful? You can have it delivered right to your inbox by signing up here.
What is Courage?
The day before he fell ill, Chuck Colson recorded this important video about the virtue of courage:
“Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”–1 Cor. 15:58
Think Christianly with Jonathan Morrow
Why Are We Still Debating Darwin?
“In his “Socrates in the City” talk in Washington last week, Steve Meyer asked: “Is there a scientific controversy about the theory of evolution?” After quoting many spokesmen for official science who deny the existence of any such controversy, or any reason to doubt evolutionary theory whatsoever, Meyer showed that there are significant reasons to doubt both biological and chemical evolutionary theory.
He first addressed the problems associated with chemical evolutionary theory, which “attempts to explain the origin of the first life from simpler pre-existing chemicals.” Here he explained the critical question of the origin of genetic information. This is the problem he addressed in his bookSignature in the Cell, a problem that has beset all attempts to explain the origin of life by reference to undirected chemical evolutionary processes.
The most important idea for laymen to grasp is that of biological information. It’s difficult to understand “exactly what information is,” Meyer has written. It’s not a physical thing. He quotes the evolutionary biologist George Williams as saying that information “doesn’t have mass or charge or length,” and matter “doesn’t have bytes.” It follows that matter and information belong to “two separate domains.”
Information in biology is best understood as analogous to software code. Recall Bill Gates’s comment: “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”
Software is a set of instructions for a new program in a computer. Likewise, DNA contains a set of instructions for the assembly of parts, namely proteins, within a cell. In the 19th century the cell was thought to be simple. Darwin and his contemporaries had no way of knowing just how complex it was. The cell today is sometimes compared to a high-tech factory. (Except it’s much more complex than that — factories can’t replicate themselves.)
Here is the key question: How did the requisite information get into the DNA in the first place? Without it, the first cell would never have been…” (read the rest)
Think Christianly with Jonathan Morrow
New York Times’ Columnist Ross Douthat Talks About the State of American Christianity
Interesting interview:
“In his new book “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics,” Ross Douthat, an Op-Ed columnist for The Times, writes about how Christianity lost its central place in American life through a variety of factors, among them the religion’s failed attempts to accommodate secular trends; a strong identification of the church with strictly conservative politics; a lack of great religious-inspired art; and the appeal to a “God within” that tailors spirituality to the citizens of a self-help age. I recently spoke with Mr. Douthat about the book via e-mail. Below are excerpts of the conversation.
Q.
Does the book presume that a widespread, mainstream Christianity is necessary to have a thriving United States?
A.
It depends what you mean by “thriving.” I’m not arguing that if we don’t all repent our sins tomorrow, we’re going to be conquered by the Chinese or collapse into a Balkans-style civil war. I’m quite confident that America will remain rich, powerful and relatively stable even if the religious trends I’m describing continue apace. But I do think that institutional Christianity has offered something important to our nation — sometimes a moral critique of our excesses, sometimes a kind of invisible mortar for our common life — that today’s heresies are unlikely to provide.
Q.
What do you mean by the words “heretics” and “heresy” in the book?
A.
I mean expressions of religious belief that are no longer traditionally Christian, but remain deeply influenced by Christianity — and fascinated, in particular, by the figure of Jesus of Nazareth — in ways that are hard to describe as post-Christian or non-Christian or secular. It’s a loaded word, obviously, but I think it’s the best way to describe the religious landscape in America today: Diverse, fragmented, polarized, and yet Christ-haunted all the same.
Q.
Evangelicals and Catholics united with each other “in the cause of culture war.” You argue that culture war is not the best use of Christianity, but is it the strongest glue left to it?
A.
Sometimes it seems to be. In an era of weakened religious affiliation and intensified partisanship, the zeal that’s associated with political combat can supply believers with the feeling of cohesion and common purpose that the institutional churches aren’t always able to supply. The danger here is obvious: If American Christianity is just one expression of the identity politics of conservative America, then it isn’t really much of a Christianity at all. But at the same time, it isn’t enough to say that believers should just stay away from politics entirely. Like all Americans, Christians have an obligation be engaged citizens, and to bring their beliefs to bear on the great debates in our society. If they shirked that duty, you wouldn’t just lose Jerry Falwell or Al Sharpton – you’d lose Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King.
Q.
You write about current religious popular art feeling “middlebrow, garish and naïve” or “ingenuous and tacky.” How might that change, and how important is it that it does?
A.
One of the striking things about the post-1960s era is how unimportant sacred art and architecture have become in our culture. Obviously some of that reflects the secular biases of our artists and intellectuals. But some of it reflects the straightforward failures of believers to write the novels and make the films and build the cathedrals that would testify, more eloquently than any polemic, to the Christian view of God and man. The critic Alan Jacobs observed to me once that much of what remains of highbrow Christian culture in the West is sustained not by theologians or bishops or pastors, but by poets and novelists and memoirists — C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton and W.H. Auden and Flannery O’Connor and so on. He’s right, and we need more like them.”
Read the rest of John William’s interview with Ross Douthat here.
Here’s my perspective and what Christians can do to better engage culture.
How do you think Christians are doing? What do you think needs to change?
Think Christianly with Jonathan Morrow