Have you heard of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview? If not you need to get to know them! Every week they release a two minute warning video that is well worth your time. In this video, John Stonestreet offers some great insight on how culture works:
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Turns Out Most DNA Is Not Junk After All
“The thought before the start of the project, said Thomas Gingeras, an Encode researcher from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, was that only 5 to 10 percent of the DNA in a human being was actually being used.
The big surprise was not only that almost all of the DNA is used but also that a large proportion of it is gene switches. Before Encode, said Dr. John Stamatoyannopoulos, a University of Washington scientist who was part of the project, “if you had said half of the genome and probably more has instructions for turning genes on and off, I don’t think people would have believed you.”
By the time the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, embarked on Encode, major advances in DNA sequencing and computational biology had made it conceivable to try to understand the dark matter of human DNA. Even so, the analysis was daunting — the researchers generated 15 trillion bytes of raw data. Analyzing the data required the equivalent of more than 300 years of computer time.” – (read the rest here)
Listen to Dr. Fuz Rana’s analysis here.
Other great analysis and the validation of the design inference here.
Why hasn’t Christianity had more influence on major intellectual institutions?
“One reason Christianity has failed to exert much influence on the major intellectual institutions of America is that too many Christians hold their beliefs in an uninformed and precarious fashion. Instead of pursuing answers to the toughest questions an unbelieving world can marshal, they attempt to preserve certainty through ignorance and isolation, relying on platitudes rather than arguments.”-Douglas Groothuis (Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith)
In short, a faith founded on unstable feelings and blind irrationality will not make much of an impact on the unbelieving world. Maybe that’s also why this kind of faith has so little impact on the believing world too.
We can do better. I lay out a vision for how Christians can cultivate a thoughtful faith in chapter 5 of my latest book. You can learn more about it here.
Why Marriage Matters (Video)
Marriage — it’s a lot bigger than just what happens on the wedding day. Marriage is our most important and timeless social institution, which means that changing marriage has consequences for all of society. Watch this brief 3 minute video that explains why everyone needs to stand up for natural marriage.
Learn more about the important work ADF is doing here. (Alliance Defending Freedom)
Summary of Alvin Plantinga’s Updated Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism
“The basic idea of my argument could be put (a bit crudely) as follows. First, the probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low. (To put it a bit inaccurately but suggestively, if naturalism and evolution were both true, our cognitive faculties would very likely not be reliable.) But then according to the second premise of my argument, if I believe both naturalism and evolution, I have a defeater for my intuitive assumption that my cognitive faculties are reliable. If I have a defeater for that belief, however, then I have a defeater for any belief I take to be produced by my cognitive faculties. That means that I have a defeater for my belief that naturalism and evolution are true. So my belief that naturalism and evolution are true gives me a defeater for that very belief; that belief shoots itself in the foot and is self-referentially incoherent; therefore I cannot rationally accept it. And if one can’t accept both naturalism and evolution, that pillar of current science, then there is serious conflict between naturalism and science.” – Alvin Plantinga
*Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (p. 314). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.