I’m working my way through Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey because it is so useful to both Christians and non-Christians today.  In our western world it is not considered polite to mix public and private, secular and sacred areas. This division keeps Christianity from having as big an impact as it could have.  This is a second blog on the book with more to come because we all need to be reminded of the total truth that Christianity claims (and represents in my view).

Pearcey says the tragedy of the two-story split is that the things that matter most in life (dignity, freedom, personal identity, ultimate purpose) have been cast into the upper story with no grounding in accepted definitions of knowledge.  The bottom story is reserved for reason, scientific knowledge, facts, rationality.  But no one can live in that lower story because it takes all the joy and beauty out of life.

Pearcey wants all aspects of life to be injected with a Christian worldview perspective.  To do this, she says we must ask three sets of questions:

Creation: how was this aspect of the world originally created?  What was its original nature and purpose?

Fall: how has it been twisted and distorted by the fall?  How has it been corrupted by false worldviews?

Redemption: how can we bring this aspect of the world under the lordship of Christ, restoring it to its original, created purpose?

One example she uses appeals to me since that’s where I work everyday as a teacher — education.  Creation says that children are created in the image of God.  Education should seek to address all aspects of the human person.  Yet the biblical view of human nature is realistic enough because of the fall to remind us that children are prone to sin and in need of moral and intellectual direction.  Children are not naturally innocent and shouldn’t be allowed to come up with their own morality.  Finally, redemption means that education should help equip students to take up vocations to bring about a better world.

I was just thinking about a powerful and provocative book by Nancy Pearcey called Total Truth (2004).  I looked at my notes about it and wanted to share it here. The book discusses the split between the sacred and the secular in today’s society—a major problem.  Does God belong in the public square in areas of politics, business, law, and education?  Or is religion strictly a private matter?  Secular thinkers have ruled Christian principles out of bounds in the public arena.  According to Pearcey, we need to unify our fragmented lives and understand there is such a thing as total truth that applies all across society, not just in religious matters..  This is a worldview book, dealing with the importance of how we see and understand the world.  In the next few blogs, I would like to mention some of the highlights of this book.

She says the first step to form a Christian worldview is to overcome a sharp divide in our society between the public and private.  We are told there is a public sphere which is scientific and value-free.  It is made up of facts and scientific knowledge.  It is rational and verifiable.  It is objective and universally valid.  Then we are told that there is a private sphere made up of personal preferences, values, individual choices that are full of subjective feelings.  It’s nonrational and noncognitive.  This divide is the single most potent weapon to delegitimize the biblical perspective in the public square today.  Most secularists consign religion to the value sphere, treating it as if it has no relevance to the public realm.

Pearcey believes Christians have to find a way to overcome this dichotomy.  She turns to a classic book called The Christian Mind by Harry Blamires, in which the author claimed there is no longer a Christian mind.  He meant there was no shared, biblically based set of assumptions on subjects like law, education, economics, politics, science, or the arts. Christians follow the Bible and pray, but outside of church they succumb to secularism.  We need to understand that Christianity gives truth about the whole of reality.  She warns of a particular danger here — if Christians do not consciously develop a biblical approach to all aspects of their lives,  they will unconsciously absorb some other philosophical approaches.

Pearcey offers three examples of how Christians need to influence their culture based on a worldview that sees the value of Christianity in all aspects of life.  Her first case involves the way Christians are taking over philosophy departments and universities across the country.  Why is this happening?  Largely because of the work of one Christian philosopher – Alvin Plantinga.  He writes well and has shown that Christians are capable of using their work to influence society, in this case academia.  Another example is the work of David Larson, who turned around the medical community on the subject of religion and health.  His studies found that religious beliefs actually correlate with better mental health, in contrast to Freud, who had said belief in God was a neurosis.  The final example is Marvin Olasky, a former Marxist who analyzed American welfare policy.  He discovered that churches didn’t just hand out money to the poor.  Instead, they helped people change their lives, focusing on job training and education.  Churches required that the poor do some useful work, giving them a chance to rebuild their dignity by making a worthwhile contribution to society.  On the other hand, government aid to the poor actually makes things worse by rewarding antisocial and dysfunctional patterns.  It was Olasky who came up with the term “compassionate conservatism.” This concept resonated with George W. Bush, who attempted to make changes in dealing with the poor based on this concept.  So these three examples illustrate the way people’s Christian beliefs can go beyond the private realm to make positive changes in the public sphere.

I introduced an essay in the last blog post–“Unspeakable Ethics, Natural Law” by Arthur Leff, Yale law professor. Here’s a non-Christian who is very uncomfortable about the possible lack of God and what that does to the existence of morals and natural law. His point, which I covered in the previous post, was that without God we all become “gods” who set the standards in our own minds. A scary proposition, indeed.

As a coninuation, I’d like to explore the rest of his essay. Most of Leff’s essay consists of a review of all the unsuccessful attempts to establish an objective moral order on a foundation of human construction (taking God’s place) – command of the sovereign (a king), the majority of the voters, the principle of utility, the Supreme Court interpretations,… Every alternative rests ultimately on human authority. Every system fails the test of “the grand sez who,” according to Leff. In other words, why should we listen to anyone else tell us what’s right. What gives them the superior position to legislate morality for all of us?

Here is the end of his essay: “All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves, and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us “good.” As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: napalm in babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved… There is in the world such a thing as evil. [All together now: ] Sez who? God help us.” Powerful words. There needs to be a God to give morality a sure foundation.

There is a great essay by Arthur Leff (Yale Law Professor) entitled “Unspeakable Ethics, Natural Law.” He is explaining the difficulty modern people are having with ethics and morality now that they have discarded the idea of God and His transcendent laws of behavior.
In one part of his essay he says the following: “I want to believe and so do you in a complete, transcendent,… set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe and so do you in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves what we ought to be.” You can see the problem here according to Leff. We all want to be our own gods, setting up our own morality. But then how do we get others to go along with this arrangement?
With God out of the picture, Leff says every human becomes a “godlet” with as much authority to set standards as any other godlet. For example, if a human says “thou shall not commit adultery,” he invites “the formal intellectual equivalent of what is known in bar rooms and schoolyards as ‘the grand sez who?'” In other words, what gives one person the authority to prescribe what is good for another person? Here’s the key question. How can we get others to obey our idea of morality if we are all gods unto ourselves?

I’ll discuss more of this essay in a future blog post.

I have been going over various scientific discoveries that seem to point to the existence of God. We’ve covered the beginning of the universe, the beginning of life, large-scale design, and small-scale design including molecular machines and DNA. This time I’m going to cover several other discoveries in a more brief format.
So here are some of the more interesting discoveries. For one thing, scientists have explored something called the Cambrian explosion, which is the sudden appearance in the past of far more complex organisms than those that preceded them. Darwinian evolution is supposed to take place in a gradual, slow process, but where did all the new information come from that allowed these more complex beings to exist? Then there’s the fact that bacteria have not changed species for over 150 years. Maybe you’ve heard of the idea that if there was enough time, monkeys could type the great works of Shakespeare? Well, somebody ran something called a Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, which ended up finding that 24 letters from one Shakespearean play took 2700 trillion trillion trillion monkey years.
In the area of anthropology, the more hominid discoveries that are made, the more confusing the picture is of hominid classification. Also in anthropology the “out of Eden” idea of the start of the modern human race has gained traction over the many-places rise of humans. This sounds a bit like the Genesis account of Eden as the single starting point for modern humans. Anthropology also has its own “Big Bang” when it comes to the rapid development of jewelry making, hunting, music making, painting, and the use of tools by our ancestors. These all seem to come into existence in the blink of an eye rather than gradually evolving over countless centuries. A big discovery recently has been by the ENCODE project, which discovered that so-called “junk” DNA actually serves a purpose, a blow to evolutionists who saw such DNA as dead ends from past mutations.
So for all the various reasons listed above, it looks like the idea of God has come back into the scientific world. Stay tuned for further discoveries.

We have been working our way through several areas of science that indicate the possibility of God’s existence, thanks to recent scientific discoveries. So far we have covered the beginning of the universe, the beginning of life, and large-scale design. This time, let’s take a look at life on the molecular level and see what science has been discovering about that.

Michael Behe shook up the biological world when he wrote Darwin’s Black Box, which explored something known as molecular machines and irreducible complexity. For example, he looked at the bacterial flagellar motor used to propel bacteria through its medium. These motors have a large number of parts that all have to be there simultaneously for the motor to work, which seems to argue against random, slow-developing evolution. He asks how it is possible for an undesigned process like evolution to bring about all the correct parts at the same time. Having a portion of the motor would not give the organism any advantage. This and other machines on the small scale seem to suggest a designer behind it all.

The other big area of biology that also seems to bring an intelligent designer into the picture is DNA. Bill Gates once said DNA was like a computer program but “far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” Science has now discovered DNA is a computer language used to create proteins, the building blocks of life. All languages we have ever encountered always came from an intelligence source, so it’s easy to make the case that DNA had to have a programmer behind it. If you would like to see DNA in action, take a look at The Mystery of Life’s Origins, a DVD put out by Illustra Media. In this documentary, we see a computer-aided video that shows DNA as it is used to create proteins. It’s fascinating.

I’d like to explore in the next blog post a few more discoveries that have led many scientists to conclude that it is certainly possible God exists.

For this blog post, I would like to focus on what I think is the best argument for the existence of God – design in the universe. Years ago we didn’t have the instruments to be able to detect design on the large scale or the small scale, but recently design features have been popping up all over the place.

Let’s start with large-scale design all across the universe. Over the past few years scientists have discovered an ever-growing list of characteristics that must have specific values for life to exist. I’m just going to list some of them here – the strong nuclear force constant, the weak nuclear force constant, gravity, electromagnetism, the ratio of proton to electron mass, expansion rate of the universe, the mass density of the universe, the velocity of light, the average distance between stars, the number of active neutrinos in the universe. There are well over 100 of these parameters that have to be precisely figured for life to exist. For example, someone once calculated that if the force of gravity changed the equivalent of 1 inch on a tape measure spread across the entire universe, there would be no life. The same is true when we look at the universe of that closer to home. The earth, for example, has to be in the right location in the solar system, have the right atmosphere, have the right kind of plate tectonics, be tilted exactly as it is, and so on. The sun must be the correct color, put out an exact amount in its solar wind, be in the right location of the galaxy, and on and on.

This large-scale design is obvious to scientists. Steven Weinberg, an atheist scientist, expressed amazement at the way the cosmological constant (the energy density of empty space) is “remarkably well-adjusted in our favor.” Paul Davies, a well-known author and scientist, said this: “There is powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the universe. The impression of design is overwhelming.”

Next time I’d like to look at design on the microscopic level. Since people today are impressed with scientific pronouncements, this discussion of design is a good way to interact with those who don’t think there is a God.

In the last blog I discussed the beginning of the universe and how the discovery of the Big Bang has caused many to reconsider the possibility that God acted to create the universe. Let’s take a look now at the beginning of life itself and how scientists are stumped to explain it from a strictly materialistic viewpoint.

One hundred years ago there was great optimism that life was easy to get started. A famous experiment (Miller-Urey) took gases that were thought to be part of the early Earth’s atmosphere, zapped them with an electrode, and collected a tarry substance, which turned out to be amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Scientists were elated, but their joy was short-lived. Since then the complexity of even the simplest organisms has proved a huge challenge to those who think life started without the input of information from a creator. The Cambrian explosion has revealed a short time period in which complex organisms popped into existence from very simple pre-existing ones. The SETI project, in which radio telescopes have attempted to listen in for signals from outer space, has proved a failure. Scientists regularly hold meetings to come up with materialistic explanations for the beginning of life, but they have proved to be dead ends.

Then there is the difficulty of the Darwinian explanation for the apparent evolution of life on earth. For the Darwinian hypothesis to be treated with respect, four things are necessary – belief in the honesty of the scientists themselves, spontaneous generation to get life started, the usefulness of mutation and natural selection to change and add complexity to a species, and transitions to show the changes over time. But each of these has proved to have huge problems. Scientists present their findings as facts when in many cases they have a pre-determined philosophy called scientism which colors their findings. I mean that before they have looked for any evidence, many of these individuals have excluded the possibility of any divine interaction with this world, thus making only material causes possible. I’ve already mentioned the problem with spontaneous generation to get life started – no one can figure out how it is possible that random processes  could come together to create something as intricate as even one-celled life. Mutation has a problem as well – it cannot produce new information which will enhance a species. Finally, transitions have failed to show up as Darwin was hoping they would.

Plenty more to come as far as scientific discoveries go. In the next blog post I would like to look at design in the universe, which to me is probably the key element that points to the possibility of a God.

For the next two weeks I’ll be speaking to a class at church regarding recent scientific discoveries that support the idea of the existence of God. What makes these discoveries interesting is the history of science over the last few centuries. Science grew out of Christianity and was nurtured by early scientists who had no problem combining their religious faith with their exploration of the universe. Then the Enlightenment came in the late 1600s and 1700s, bringing a new attitude – science was going to be done as if no God existed. When Darwin came on the scene and promulgated the idea of evolution, it look like victory for those who did not believe there was a God. But over the last century things have changed. I’d like to cover some of those changes in this and future posts.

Consider the beginning of the universe. When Edwin Hubble realized galaxies were flying away from each other, he and others knew this was the sign that the universe had exploded into existence in the distant past. Those who disliked this theory of the origin of the universe from a single point derisively referred to it as the “Big Bang.” The reaction by some to this new theory was interesting. Take Arthur Eddington, British physicist, mathematician, and astronomer. He said the idea of a beginning to the universe was “repugnant.” Now isn’t that fascinating? Instead of terms like “amazing,” “silly,” “preposterous,” or “significant,” he used the term that suggested he was not happy with the theory because of how it made him feel. This suggests to me that he was more interested in defending a philosophy rather than wherever the science was taking him. After all, if the universe came into existence, something outside the universe had to get it going. This suggested a supernatural cause, a position which gets close to allowing God into the picture.

Then there was Albert Einstein, probably the most famous scientist of all time. He was so disturbed with the idea of a beginning to the universe that he fudged his calculations to suggest that the universe had always been here. Why would well-known people be so uncomfortable with a scientific finding? Because many in the scientific world have come to believe in scientism rather than science. They believe science has all the answers to life. But the Big Bang suggests the need for a big banger to get the universe started.

Recent science discoveries have validated the Big Bang theory for the start of the universe. It may be the best-tested theory in all of science. Scientists who reject the idea of God or the supernatural have had a difficult time wrestling with the concept of getting something from nothing – all matter, space, time, and energy came from nothing. More to follow in future posts.

Here’s another in a series on messianic prophecies.  Take a look at Daniel 9:24-26.

There’s a reference here to the Anointed One (the messiah) coming to Israel, and a time line is given. A decree is issued, the Messiah comes, he is killed, and then  the city is destroyed.

OK, let’s try to understand this. Some may disagree with what I will cover here, but many scholars believe the following is the best explanation.

First, there is an issue of the number of years involved. Daniel refers to “sevens,” which most Bible scholars understand as a group of seven years. He says there will be a total of 69 of these sevens from a decree to rebuild Jerusalem until the messiah comes. Let’s suppose that those refer to a seven-year series. We must then multiply 69×7 to get the total number of years, which comes out to be 483. But since the Jews used a 360-day year, we need to multiply 483×360 to see how many total days Daniel was talking about. This ends up with a large number – 173,880. Let’s convert this to years that we are comfortable with, which are composed of 365 days. Have I lost anyone yet? We take 173,880 and divide it by 365. This will give us the total number of years we would compute –476.

Fine, but we don’t know yet the starting point of this time., which Daniel says is the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem. Again, this is not a settled point, but many Bible scholars think it refers to the decree of Artaxerxes in 445 B. C., which allowed Nehemiah to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the city which had been destroyed by Babylon.

One last bit of math is necessary here. Starting at 445 BC, we mark off 476 years and end up at 31 A. D. This, of course, is during the time of Jesus’s ministry. Sounds pretty accurate, doesn’t it?

But are Christians just reading in these numbers in an attempt to twist them to conform to the life of Jesus? Let’s look at what the Jewish reaction to them has been. In the Qumran community, famous for the Dead Sea Scrolls, there was great fervor during Jesus’s time because they had done the same calculating. In the Babylonian Talmud, completed between 200-500 A.D., there’s a reference to this passage in Daniel:” these times were over long ago.” Again, it sounds like the Jews themselves came up with roughly the same dating. Finally the highly respected 12th-century rabbi Maimonides was quoted as saying that the end times had already come without a sign of the Messiah. He urged rabbis not to spend time calculating the days of Messiah as laid out by Daniel because they would be disappointed. Once more,  careful readers placed Daniel’s prophecy in the early first century

So these verses by Daniel are tantalizing because they suggest Jesus is the fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy. Even if some critics want to late date Daniel to 100 B. C., this would still leave the mystery of how he was able to foresee the ministry of Jesus.