Category Archives: Thinking About Big Questions

Posted on

Darwin’s Doubt with Eric Metaxas and Stephen Meyer (Video)

Here is an excellent video on Darwinian evolution, Intelligent Design and Science. It took place at Socrates in the City. Enjoy!

“Darwin’s Doubt” with Stephen Meyer from Socrates in the City on Vimeo.

“In the origin of species, Darwin openly acknowledges important weaknesses in his theory and professed his own doubts about key aspects of it. Yet today’s public defenders of a Darwin-only science curriculum apparently do not want these, or any other scientific doubts about contemporary Darwinian theory, reported to students. This book addresses Darwin’s most significant doubt . . . and how a seemingly isolated anomaly that Darwin acknowledged almost in passing has grown to become illustrative of a fundamental problem for all of evolutionary biology.” —FROM THE PROLOGUE

Learn more here.

Posted on

There is no such thing as a religiously neutral intellectual endeavor

There is no such thing as religiously neutral intellectual endeavor — or rather there is no such thing as serious, substantial and relatively complete intellectual endeavor that is religiously neutral. – Alvin Plantinga

This is a very important point to bring up. After all, as Christians we have a point of view. A perspective on God in general and Jesus in particular. Plantinga’s point is that if you give serious thought to ultimate questions, you can’t be neutral. Neutrality in and of itself is not a virtue. Too much is at stake.

But what this observation doesn’t mean is that if you have a point of view about ultimate reality, you can’t be objective. We should always be honest about where we are coming from but we must also allow evidence and reason (reality) to correct our point of view. This is the kind of critical realism that allows us to make genuine progress in discovering more about the way reality actually is.

Want to read some of our most popular posts?

Posted on

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel

“God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel. False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.” – J. Gresham Machen

*Address delivered on September 20, 1912, at the opening of the 101st session of Princeton Theological Seminary.

Posted on

Even Really Big Things (Like the Universe) Need an Explanation

The 18th Century intellectual G. W. Leibniz famously asked the fundamental question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (By the way, he co-discovered calculus…so you can blame him for that one!). In other words, our common sense intuition is that everything that exists has an explanation of its existence. Christian philosopher William Lane Craig offers a very helpful way of making this abstract concept concrete:

“Imagine that you’re hiking through the woods and you come across a translucent ball lying on the forest floor. You would naturally wonder how it came to be there. If one of your hiking partners said to you, “Hey, it just exists inexplicably. Don’t worry about it!” you’d either think that he was crazy or figure that he just wanted you to keep moving. No one would take seriously the suggestion that the ball existed there with literally no explanation. Now suppose you increase the size of the ball in this story so that it’s the size of a car. That wouldn’t do anything to satisfy or remove the demand for an explanation. Suppose it were the size of a house. Same problem. Suppose it were the size of a continent or a planet. Same problem. Suppose it were the size of the entire universe. Same problem. Merely increasing the size of the ball does nothing to affect the need of an explanation.”

Would this apply to God? No, because if He exists, He does so necessarily. But the universe is clearly contingent (i.e., did not “have to” exist of its own nature). This is a version of the cosmological argument for God’s existence. But if God made the universe, then who made God?

Want to explore the evidence for God further? Sean McDowell and I wrote a readable book that will introduce you to the existence of God (we cover science, philosophy, history, and the Bible). We also interview some leading Christian intellectuals in the book as well. We hope you will find it helpful. Learn more here.

Have you subscribed to the Think Christianly Podcast yet? Subscribe with iTunes I RSS

Let us help you Think Christianly by signing up for our email list. (No Spam!)

Be sure to follow us on Twitter: @Jonathan_Morrow I @thnkchristianly