Monday 29 August 2016

Finding Truth

by Nancy Pearcey in Finding Truth

What is being communicated [in the Bible] is an accurate description of reality, not a belief system about it.
This reality orientation is the positive intellectual climate in which the core propositions and events of the gospel live and breathe. It is a mentality in which people are liberated by verifiable truth to challenge traditional, question power, and fight for life and healing against death and decay.
Despite this auspicious heritage, many of our contemporaries find solace in what Francis Schaeffer describes as an "escape from reason." They accept polite society's dumbed-down redefinition of faith as something totally privatized--that is, a commitment so private and so personal that evaluation and evidence are irrelevant.
The biblical attitude is one of persuasion, a will to verify and know what is true and to respond accordingly.

Thursday 25 August 2016

Cosmos: Carl Sagan

In Carl Sagan’s famous book entitled Cosmos, based on his television series of the same title, he makes the following statement: “Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things.” In this seemingly harmless definition of the entire structure of Sagan’s work, he assumes that the universe under investigation by science is a cosmos rather than a chaos. He speaks of cosmos “implying a deep interconnectedness of all things.” This is the grand presupposition of scientific inquiry, namely, that the universe we are seeking to know is coherent. There is an implied deep and profound interconnectedness of all things. The alternative to cosmos, as Sagan has indicated, is chaos. If the universe is at root chaotic, then the whole scientific enterprise collapses. If the universe is chaotic and disconnected, then no knowledge is possible at all. Even discreet bits of atomic data cannot be understood within the framework of utter chaos, so the presupposition of a coherent, rational order of all things is the screaming presupposition of scientists.

Monday 1 August 2016

Do You Desire God above All Else?


Gary Habermas offers a thought experiment to help us examine our motives concerning what we’re asking God for in prayer:

Jesus Died in Our Place

The Doctrine of Substitution  The truth about the salvation Jesus offers involves several richly immense concepts—all of which are awe-insp...