Stand to Reason Blog

Radio Sunday

Greg is on the air Sunday 2-5 p.m. PT.  Greg's guest will Michael Flannery, biography of Alfred Russell Wallace - Darwin's Heretic.

Listen live on the air or stream it on the STR app or online.

 

Christianity As Science-Starter: Galileo

Continuing from Wednesday's post, here's what Nancy Pearcey had to say in Saving Leonardo about the effect the Christian worldview had on Galileo's scientific advances:

Galileo shared Kepler's conviction that God created the world with a mathematical structure. But not everyone did. This was the question at the heart of the famous Galileo controversy. The typical story is that Galileo was persecuted because he championed the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. But the truth is that no one at the time objected to Copernicanism—as long as it was used merely as a calculating device. There was not enough empirical data yet to decide between an earth-centered and a sun-centered system. Both systems worked equally well for navigation, which was the main practical use of astronomy at the time. Most people were willing to use whichever astronomical theory worked best, without worrying about whether it was physically true.

Galileo attracted controversy because he insisted that the Copernican system was not just a useful calculating tool but physically true. The central question at stake was thus the status of mathematical truth: Does mathematics tell us what is true in the physical world? This was a philosophical question, not a theological one. And Galileo's main opponents were not churchmen but the Aristotelian philosophers in the universities. For them, mathematics was not high on the list of what makes the world what it is. The essential feature of Aristotle's universe was not quantity but quality—hot and cold, wet and dry, soft and hard. In the universities, mathematics ranked much lower than physics. A mere mathematician was not supposed to dictate to the physicists what theory they could hold.

We get a fascinating glimpse into [the] mindset of the time from the words of one of Galileo's opponents, a philosophy professor at the University of Pisa. "How far from the truth are those who wish to prove natural facts by means of mathematical reasoning," he wrote indignantly. "Anyone who thinks he can prove natural properties with mathematical arguments is simply demented, for the two sciences are very different"....

Today it seems obvious that science is about explaining nature using mathematical formulas. Not so in Galileo's day. When he declared that the book of nature is written by God in the language of mathematics, those were fighting words—a declaration of war on Aristotelian philosophy….

Galileo's victory was the triumph of the idea that nature is constructed on a mathematical blueprint.

Christians were aware that God had created the universe out of nothing, and yet they still held on to ingrained cultural ideas that grew out of a previous worldview—a worldview opposed to their Christian beliefs, containing an eternal universe, where matter wouldn't necessarily conform to the ideals of mathematics. Once again, this speaks of 1) the enduring power a worldview has over a culture, and 2) our limited ability as faulty human beings to recognize what is influencing us and submit all of our beliefs and practices to what we know to be true.

People ask, if Christianity was responsible for the development of science, why didn't science develop earlier? This is why.

(See also Part 1: Kepler.)

"Like" Ratio Christi

Chance to win today---Ratio Christi, a ministry placing Christian apologetics clubs in universities, is hosting a giveaway.  Click this link  & "Like" their page for a chance to win a copy of STR's "Ambassador’s Basic Curriculum" (ABC): Includes 15 CD’s of training with Greg Koukl—a $69.95 value. Ratio Christi is meeting a real need for so many students struggling with their faith in college.

Is Homosexuality the Worst Sin of All?

Christians define sin as “missing the mark.” It almost sounds cute. Kyle lied so he missed the mark…Oops. Katy gossiped...Shucks, that was wrong. Randy was prideful…Yikes, better stop that.

But homosexuality? Whoa! That’s more than missing the mark. That’s an abomination! Homosexuals aren’t just sinners. They’re revelers consummating their reprobate mind. Someone please cite one of the Levitical prohibitions against homosexuality (preferably Leviticus 20:13 since it includes the death penalty) and say it in the King James Version for rhetorical effect.

And Christians don’t just think homosexuality is the worst sin. We act like it too. Christians who rarely cite scripture suddenly invoke Bible verses when the topic comes up. We get uneasy when gay men come to church, but we gladly welcome post-abortive women.  We’ll move a lesbian who sits next to other females at youth group, but we won’t separate girls who gossip.

It’s no wonder the culture thinks Christians hate homosexuals. We give their behavior a unique status: the worst sin of all. And because homosexuals are committing the supreme evil, we treat them like pariahs.

As a result, not only do homosexuals think their sin is the worst, but they are the worst. They’re the chief of all sinners. That’s why our verbal antidotes like, “God hates the sin, but loves the sinner” are so ineffective. They only hear the word, “hate.”

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, when homosexuals get anxious around Christians. It shouldn’t shock us that they start their own denominations. These men and women still have spiritual yearnings, but because Christians keep them at arm’s length, they have no choice but to turn to churches with pro-gay theology that accept them.

Don’t get me wrong: homosexual behavior is a serious sin. I’m not trying to downplay the gravity of what they do. But the Bible doesn’t elevate its status above all other sins.

Although homosexual behavior was a capital crime under the Mosaic Law, so were blasphemy, false prophecy, adultery, bestiality, and many other sins. Under today’s New Testament teaching, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 places homosexuals among other sinners like thieves, drunks, swindlers, and fornicators. And 1 Timothy 1:8-11 lists them among liars, rebels, slave traders, and other sinners. There’s no special designation for any of these sins (although sexual sins are grouped together since they are sins “against the body” in 1 Corinthians 6:16-20).

Many homosexuals have come to Christ. But they didn’t do it because they believed their sin was the worst. Instead, they recognized their sin was an obstacle to fellowship with God. Making homosexuality the worst sin isn’t merely a peculiar theological mistake. It has practical ramifications that alienate men and women engaged in homosexual behavior. And it creates unnecessary offense to the gospel that’s already offensive.

 

This post is part of a series responding to common challenges on the topic of homosexuality. If you missed the first post (Did Jesus Never Say Anything about Homosexuality?), you can find it here.

Sinners Unaware

To expand my thoughts at the end of yesterday's post about the slow-moving nature of worldviews, I thought I'd post a piece I wrote a few years ago after reading a chapter called "Trusting the Theology of a Slave Owner" in A God Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards. It's a sobering reminder of our limitations as human beings in applying revealed truth to our practices:

Even as Edwards argued against the slave trade, saying it was wrong because we're all of the same human race, made by the same Maker in His image, and we ought not steal human beings and tear them away from their families, nor should we profit from others who do so—even as he argued this, Edwards continued to own slaves.

It's a scary thought that a man who knew God's word far better than I do and who spent far more time in prayer, study, and meditation than I do was blinded enough by his own sin and culture not to see a sin that is now glaringly obvious to us—that a man of such incisive and precise thinking could not see that he condemned himself with his own arguments against the slave trade.

His son, who was able to follow the logic of Edwards's arguments and the implications of his theology to the end, argued eloquently against slavery, not just the trade.  But it took those of that next generation to finally work their way completely out of the blinders of cultural complacency.

It's difficult to see clearly and then fight against a sin you're already participating in.  How much more so if your culture condones it!  Our sin blinds us and distorts our perception (a frightening reality that ought to make us more careful about giving into temptation).  Edwards had slaves, so he was not able to see the wrongness of it, and while he was ahead of his time morally in many ways, including in his arguments against the slave trade, his treatment of his slaves, and his inclusion of slaves as members of his church, we can see now how far he was from God's standard of perfect righteousness.

If this doesn't point out the need of all of us for a savior, I don't know what does!  We are all desperately in the “sinner” category (a category which includes everyone but God) in ways of which we haven't even a clue.  Edwards fought so hard for holiness in himself and mastery over his sin, and people around him would have considered him a very good man.  Some who misunderstood the gospel probably thought he was good enough to get to heaven based on his works.  But they could not even see the sin of slavery.

In the same way, as best as we try to conquer our own sin, there will be sins in our lives that we will never even recognize.  This is a humbling thought to which we are forced to respond like Paul:

Wretched man that I am!  Who will set me free from the body of this death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!... Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…. For what the Law could not do [i.e., make us righteous], weak as it was through the flesh, God did:  sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

Tomorrow I'll get back to the "Christianity As Science-Starter" series.

Christianity As Science-Starter: Kepler

In Nancy Pearcey’s excellent book, Saving Leonardo, she explains why Greek thought didn't create modern science:

[T]he ancient Greeks are often given credit for the origin of modern science. But that is a mistake. The Greeks locked up mathematical truths in a kind of Platonic heaven of ideal forms—a realm of mental blueprints or templates for all the objects in the material world. The problem was that these blueprints did not match their objects except in a rough and approximate way. Why not? Because the Greeks regarded matter as eternal, not created. Therefore matter had its own inherent, independent properties, which did not necessarily line up with the blueprints in the ideal realm.

It was their view of the nature of the universe that held them back from scientific discovery, and it was Kepler's Christian view of the creation of the universe that drove him on towards science:

[H]ow did Johann Kepler discover that the planetary orbits are ellipses? Ever since antiquity, people had thought the planets moved in circular orbits. The idea went back to Aristotle. He had reasoned that the heavens are “perfect,” and the circle is the “perfect” shape, ergo the heavenly bodies must move in circles. (This was an example of the Greeks’ deductive approach to science.) How did Kepler succeed in breaking through a settled belief in circular orbits that had held sway for two thousand years?

It began when he had difficulty plotting the orbit of Mars. The most accurate circle he could construct based on observations was slightly wobbly. Had Kepler retained the Greek mentality, he would have shrugged off such a minor aberration. His thinking would have been that objects correspond to geometrical ideals, after all, only approximately. But Kepler was a devout Lutheran. He was convinced that if God wanted a line to form a circle, it would be exactly a circle. And if it was not exactly a circle, it must be exactly something else. It would not be merely an arbitrary departure from the ideal. This theological conviction sustained Kepler through six years of intellectual struggle and thousands of pages of scientific calculations before he finally hit upon the idea of ellipses.

Kepler later spoke gratefully of the minor mismatch in Mars’ orbit as a “gift from God” because it spurred his greatest scientific breakthrough. The chief aim of science, he said, is “to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”

One aspect of this I find interesting is the fact that it took so very long for the ideas of Christianity to overcome previously held cultural ideas left over from the Greeks. As was the case in the moral realm (as I discussed yesterday), the Christian worldview in reference to the physical realm was slowly working its way through Western culture. No culture turns quickly, and God has a very long-term view of progress, working within the human limitations that make it difficult for a massive group of people to change an entrenched, accepted paradigm.

I think we underestimate the power culture has over our view of the world, and this often causes unfair scorn of those in the past who couldn't see the applications of truths that we easily see today. This underestimation also leads to accusations against God for not completely remaking human culture when He gave the Israelites the Law. But the truth is, human society can be dangerously fractured by radical, abrupt, imposed change, and God wisely chose to work through the centuries in as stable a way as possible. It's amazing to think how far we must still have to go.

Over the next few days, I'll continue this "Christianity As Science-Starter" series with Galileo and Newton.

Engaging the Abortion Discussion

Greg outlined two parts of arguing for the pro-life position:

The Moral Logic

Is the Unborn a Human Person?

 

What About the Inquisition?

We all expect the Spanish Inquisition to show up sooner or later in our discussions with atheists. Does the presence of the Inquisition in Christian history discredit all of Christianity? Does it render our past completely barbaric?

Here's a question that can help clarify the issues involved with the Inquisition objection: Do you honor Thomas Edison for inventing the light bulb, or do you merely scoff at him for not inventing a computer? Edison explored the same world we explore, and yet he only invented a light bulb. Was he a colossal failure? Absolutely not. Data (in this case, the data of the physical world) takes time to work through, sort out, and apply. Edison had a less than perfect understanding of the world, but he furthered the process of our knowledge and application of the facts of nature by one more step, moving us all towards a more precise understanding of the one reality of nature that has existed since the beginning. Eventually scientific data would lead to computers, but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate the beauty and wonder of the invention of the light bulb in its own time. And even though at the time of the light bulb's creation there were many other false ideas about how to apply the laws of nature (the use of leeches, for example), the false applications did not discredit science for all time.

Now move this same idea away from science and into the realm of morality and Christianity. Like the unchanging laws of nature, we have the unchanging words of God in the Bible. And as in the world of science, in the world of Christianity we've had to work out our knowledge and application of those unchanging words into our societies. This takes time because human societies started off so far from the ideal—with many false ideas and without knowledge of some true ideas of application that hadn't yet occurred to them. (For example, the idea that a pluralistic society could peacefully exist and not tear itself apart looks obvious to us now, but before the cultural situation made the discovery of this radically new idea possible, it was assumed that one must enforce unanimity for the good of the citizens, in order to survive.)

It's no surprise, then, that 500 years ago societies had only reached the moral equivalent of the light bulb and not the computer; but the problem was in the application, not in the data. That is, as inevitably as an application of the facts of the physical world led to computers, so the ideas of the Bible have led to the free societies we now see in the West. But one ought not be surprised by the amount of time it took the societies of the West to work through ideas based on biblical data any more than one is surprised by the thousands of years it took us to work through scientific ideas based on the observable data of nature. Nor does it make any more sense to fault the unchanging Bible itself for those societies' slow pace than it does to fault the always-present laws of nature for our formerly rudimentary ideas about science. The Bible and nature remained the same even if the implications had not yet been fully explored and rightly applied. And, as with the light bulb, we ought to honor the steps that were made in creating better societies rather than merely degrade the people of the past for not creating the inventions and institutions we have today.

But why, we may then ask, when first creating the nation of Israel, did God not immediately demand that they live as we do today? The answer might be similar to the reason why He didn't supply them with computers. A computer would have been completely beyond their grasp. In the same way, Israel had a difficult enough time adjusting their society to what God did give them explicitly at that time. Some things, to be fully understood, accepted, and lived out, have to be reached on our own as we struggle over time, learning little by little. Applications of ideas are discovered and then take time to permeate and transform a society. This, in turn, lays the groundwork for discovering more applications.

What God did do is speak to Israel where they were. He addressed the world as they knew it, and He set a foundation of ideas in place through the Old and New Testaments that would infect societies in such a way that the spread of those ideas would eventually lead us to where we are today. He told us that we're all—men and women—created in His image (Gen 1:27) and equal in value before Him (Gal 3:28, Philemon). We're not to kidnap people and sell them into slavery (Ex 21:16), we're not to punish people in a way that humiliates them (Deut 25:3), we're not to make converts by the sword (John 3:5-8, 18:36), the State is under God and the law (Deut 17:14-20), no one—rich or poor (Lev 19:15), native or foreigner (Num 15:15-16)—is to be favored when justice is dispensed, and the foundation goes on and on.

Unfortunately, just as the lack of good scientific instruments slowed the discovery and application of the laws of nature, our moral weaknesses—stubbornness, ignorance, biases, selfishness, and inherited false beliefs—have made the application of the Bible to our societies a difficult, slow process. This is why the Inquisition, while condemnable, is not unexpected or surprising and so does not successfully argue against the truthfulness of Christianity. And in fact, it gives further witness to the truthfulness of the Bible's central message of our desperate need for Jesus and the forgiveness He provides.

Sufficiency of Scripture (Video)

What is a compelling argument from Scripture for the sufficiency of Scripture?

Links Mentioned on the Show

The following are links that were either mentioned on this week's show or inspired by it, as posted live on the @STRtweets Twitter feed:

• The SLED Test - Four Top Arguments [against Abortion] by Steve Wagner (PDF)

• Life Unworthy of Life by Greg Koukl

Register at str.org and sign in to listen to today's show or download any archived show for free.

Different, but Equal?

Today is Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. This documentary trailer is a good reminder that the idea of universal human rights and value is one that continually needs to be argued for. It's not something we, as fallen, self-centered human beings, gravitate towards naturally. Someone has different features from us? Different abilities? Different level of societal importance? Well then, she must not be as valuable as we are!

Our inability to identify with, empathize with, and value those on a lower rung of the social, ability, or power ladder has led to countless atrocities in history, and all because of the way this question is answered:

Are we valuable because of what we are, or because of what we do?

That is, is every human being valuable simply because he or she is, by nature, the kind of being that's valuable, or do we earn our value individually by meeting a certain standard of characteristics (race, religion, sex, ability, size, level of development, etc.) agreed upon by the society?

If the second is the case, then there's no such thing as equality, and universal human rights are a sham. If the second is the case, then you end up with something like this, and while you might object for practical reasons, there's no moral reason to condemn it.