Category: Apologetics

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"People, people who hate people, are the luckiest people, in the world . . ." | an amazing repost.

A Simple And Scary Fact
By , Published February 15th, 2012
This picture’s gonna make sense in a minute. Hang in there.

I listen to talk radio sometimes, mostly just while driving to and from work. (For you Occupiers out there, here is a link where you can learn more about this “work” thing. See in particular section 1.2, “Getting a Job.”)

For the past two days, a work assignment has required me to listen to talk radio all day long. I don’t really mind except that it gets me riled up.

Right now everybody’s talking about the HHS mandate requiring all employers — including Catholic hospitals and schools and other religious institutions and individuals – to provide insurance plans that include free contraception, sterilization, and abortion drugs for employees.

I already wrote about why this flies in the face of everything America is supposed to stand for — namely, liberty. (Occupiers, look that up too. It’s that thing that gets sacrificed when other people have to provide you with what you feel you deserve.)

Anyway, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh today, and he was talking about the HHS mandate. I’m paraphrasing here, but basically he boiled it down like this:

Barack Obama, his administration, proponents of this health care regulation, abortion advocates, feminazis (his word), and pretty much all people who lean to the Left in American politics are deeply convinced that contraception should be something everybody can get anytime.

All these people are so convinced of this, so vocal, so organized, with big fancy multi-million dollar organizations like NARAL and Planned Parenthood, that the government feels confident to enact legislation that makes people provide abortion and contraception for others whether they want to or not.

What all this boils down to is a very simple thing: a significant number of people want to have sex without it resulting in babies. I’m not going to go into sexual morality right now. I’m gonna get bigger with this and maybe blow your mind a little.

It all boils down to babies.

Really think about it. I want you to consider it for a second. All these websites and rants and laws and organizations and talk shows and signs and court cases, every conflict that’s ever occurred over abortion or birth control, boils down to this:

“What’d I do?”

It seems harmless, doesn’t it?

Why all the fuss about a baby?

I stopped listening to Rush at that point ’cause I had other things to do, but here’s what he didn’t get to: babies equal responsibility. These people don’t like responsibility because it requires them to sublimate their own desires for more video game time, an Escalade, venti half-caf caramel macchiatos, and/or looking cool in bars. The responsibility of a child makes them look and feel less awesome, independent, and progressive. It is not the gentle, part-time grad-school kind of responsibility, but the kind that requires selflessness and sacrifice, which is both scary and mean.

Here’s the other thing: babies also equal people, and those people don’t like people. Most of the same people who advocate for birth control also are totally convinced of the thoroughly disproven “population bomb” theory, that basically we’re gonna bazookadruple our population in like three months — any minute now — and India is gonna explode and every single person in Africa is gonna thirst to death and 4 billion Chinese people are gonna move completely into the United States starting in Kansas and working their way out in beautiful and orderly concentric circles of need and death because there’s not enough food and there’s too many people and aaaugugughghghghhhhhh overpopulationnnnn!!!

The problem is it’s not true. I’m too tired to hit you with all the scientific data. Just type “overpopulation myth” into the search box and lots of earnest bearded academics will tell you overpopulation why it’s super true and lots of exasperated-sounding scientists will tell you why it’s not true. You can read both sides and decide for yourself.

The point is that there is a really surprisingly huge faction of the Left in America who believe humans were created for earth and not the other way around. These are not crazy fringe-dwelling people who live in squats and eat only dumpster food, either. I’m talking people I’m related to who wear normal pants and eat with utensils. They will look me in the face and tell me we’re all gonna die very soon because of global warming, which has something to do with meat and cars, and that overpopulation will destroy us all any minute (“In fact, it’s already starting.”), and furthermore, “Humans are the worst thing that ever happened to the planet. We’re, like, a virus. Like in The Matrix, y’know? It’s like, the world would be better off without us.”

(Now that picture makes sense. Oooh, I’m good.)

He then sits and basks in the profound humility and existential cleverness of this idea, leaving me to wonder: why? Why earth without humans? Why a wish, however clever, that eradicates itself?

I think of the movie I Am Legend, in which Will Smith is the last human inhabitant of New York, and goes out to hunt deer in an awesome car amongst the wild and overgrown detritus of the city. I recall deer leaping over tangled grasses and stalled cars, darting between buildings and across broken bridges, and ask myself: Would anyone, even the so-called earth-firsters, go see that movie if there were zero humans instead of one? If it was just two hours of stupid deer leaping around in the aftermath?

No.

But they haven’t thought that far ahead. The truth is, if mean space aliens did attack, the “humans are a virus” folks would not calmly hit their bongs and wait for the end. They would wee themselves and hide behind the people like me, who have all the guns.

Still, because they don’t think too deeply about things — if they did they’d be pro-life — abortion advocates and those who support free contraception on demand do not want more people around. That is the simple and scary fact.

They don’t loathe and fear the fetus because it isn’t a person. They loathe and fear it because it isa person. And they know it.

Have you heard of Pinterest? If you haven’t, don’t look it up. It will take you in. It’s an online pinboard where you can store photos (with embedded links) of stuff you like from all over the web in one handy spot. In theory, it is a convenient resource that allows one to keep track of recipes, fashions, and cool sites. In practice, it is a place where chicks who don’t even have boyfriends yet plan their weddings.

Pinterest has exploded recently, particularly among young women, and a HuffPo article analyzed its rapidly growing popularity. The headline: “The Secret To Pinterest’s Success: We’re Sick Of Each Other.”

The gist of the piece is we are sick of hearing about people and we would rather think about (1) stuff, and (2) ourselves, and (3) how those two things might go together beautifully.

There is an upside that can be seen here, since Facebook is definitely more self-aggrandizing than Pinterest. But the point is, we are tired of hearing what other people are doing and we would rather look at different methods of putting on eyeliner.

I had all these things swirling around in my head. Seriously, you guys, it’s a mess in there. If you wonder where I go for days at a time, I am walking around with visions of leaping Manhattan deer and birth control compacts and eyeliner methods in my head. I wanted to write something about it but it was all a tangled mishmash.

So I sat down just now to write and — I swear this is true — I opened up a P.J. O’Rourke book for absolutely no reason, and literally opened up to a page that said this:

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is, as the prefix indicates, that we’re in favor of living. We consider people — with a few obvious exceptions — to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, clothe them, pick up the trash after their rallies on the National Mall, and make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

Bingo!

Is it as simple as that? Maybe it is. Maybe abortion advocates see every accidental pregnancy as a welfare check or an unfulfilled woman who has to has to take precious time out from her freelance graphic design career to rinse out baby food jars. Whereas you and I see a baby as a beautiful joyous gift of possibility and hope and love and adorable magicness that one day grows into a man or woman who maybe invents a cure that works in 30 seconds for those sores you get on your tongue that make you feel like the world is ending.

The simple and scary fact: all those people who have turned free or cheap abortion and contraception on demand into a right and a sacrament? They don’t like people.

_____________________________________

Kristen Walker blah blah blah. She also blah and sometimes blah. Visit her on blah blah at blah.

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"So the atheist says to the scientist . . ."

Yesterday I had to make a choice: I could go to hear Josh McDowell speak at Queensway Cathedral (and why oh why do protestant churches ever call themselves cathedrals?) or I could go to hear a debate at the University of Toronto, sponsored by a Christian campus group known as Power to Change.

I heard Josh in 1975 at Kansas State University (that makes both of us sound really old). None of the Christian students I spoke to last night had even heard of McDowell, which surprised me, given the theme of the debate. Anyway, I chose to hear the debate. The debate was between a science professor from the University of Guelph, Kirk Durston (the Christian), and a philosopher of science from the University of Toronto, James Robert Brown (the atheist). The name of the debate was Should a Scientist Believe in God?

I appreciated that the debate was a true debate, not like the Canadian political debates where the candidates try to out-soundbite each other with loud witticisms and comebacks. First, Dr Durston was allowed 20 minutes to state the affirmative, that a scientist should believe in God. This was followed by Dr Brown’s negative assertion. Then each was given 10 minutes in turn for rebuttal, followed by a 40 minute question period (I was too far back in line and didn’t get a chance to ask a question), then each had a 5 minute summary. The auditorium at OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) was almost full.

Dr Durston, in his twenty minutes, presented a cogent argument from an evidentialist apologetic viewpoint. He later told me that this, he felt, was the level at which most of the students were operating, that they were seeking evidence for faith. I think he is well-aware of the presuppositions that underlie the acceptance of evidence, but he did not use those kinds of arguments in this debate. After listening to the two of them, I think he was wise in his choice, and presented his arguments clearly and fairly. I am biased, of course, as a Christian, but I felt he was very straightforward. He moved all the way from the creation of the cosmos to Jesus as God incarnate, which is pretty impressive given the time. Neither  presenter said much about evolution until asked, and it is fairly clear that Durston believes in Intelligent Design.

In contrast to Durston, Brown was much more animated. He began as disarming, friendly, congenial, jovial and witty. In this way seemed, at times, to try to channel the late Christopher Hitchens, who was always interesting, even when wrong. It was pretty evident that as Brown moved from good-natured humour to stern attacks on faith, that he was engaging in a well-worn rhetorical device which first disarms the audience and then moves in for an emotional “kill,” this time being over the question of theodicy: “How can a loving, omnipotent God allow (fill in the atrocity).

Both presenters were easy to follow, as both proceeded from the same starting point: the reasonableness or non-reasonableness of their respective positions.  I came to hear what the top scholars in their respective fields would have to say about faith, and was surprised to learn that the arguments hadn’t advanced further than they had. Both men had debated before, and joked about doing this every five years. I think a great opportunity could be had in asking Dr Brown a few questions:

1) He saved most of his vitriol to attack faith, even saying (tongue-in-cheek, I’m sure), that one “should be ashamed of themselves to have faith in God without rational justification” and “grow up!” A valid question could be, “What then, is your rational justification for your faith (belief) in rationality?” If faith, as a pre-theoretical commitment is so bad, what constitutes a valid theory of rationality? Do you not, Dr Brown, have faith in rationality itself? And isn’t any attempt to justify rationality required to use reason to do so? This is like interlocking one’s fingers to give a friend a boost over a wall; I lock my fingers together to make a step, my friend steps on it and is lifted up. But if I need the lift up, using my own hands as a means to do so means I will fall on my face. To use reason to show that reason is a true method requires that one already accepts reason as true, and so assumes the outcome rather than proving it.

2) This leads to another point. Brown’s arguments beg the question. Yes, if God does not exist, then all the nasty things said about faith might stand; but that hasn’t been shown. If God does exist, then the question of theodicy may be approached theologically. If God does exist, He does so whether or not we like it or believe it. He is shrouded in mystery, and we do not understand fully why disasters overtake the innocent. This being said simplistically, because there are good answers available, not, however, apart from a knowledge of God. All the question-begging however reveals something important about the “new” atheism (which, it seems, isn’t so new after all): atheists don’t like God. The idea of a being Who created all things, including the mind of the atheist, and to Whom all people are accountable, is very offensive.

I think the problem of starting an apologetic argument from evidence and reason is that it assumes a common-ground between the atheist and Christian that simple isn’t there. It assumes that reason is a neutral place where which believer and unbeliever can meet and at least agree upon the basic foundations from which all arguments can proceed. According to the Bible, however (and yes, I’d be accused of question-begging here), the unbeliever is a moral fool, and blind. As Cornelius Van Til writes:

The picture of fallen man as given in Scripture is that he knows God but does not want to recognize him as God (Rom 1). That he knows God is due to the fact that all things in the universe about him and within him speak clearly of God. It is as “knowing God” that man rebels against God. Moreover, at the beginning of history Adam, representing mankind, received from God direct supernatural communication about himself and his task in the world. All men are responsible for this revelation. Speaking of the Gentiles, Paul says that “when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened” (Rom 1:21). And further, that they “changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever” (Rom 1:25). In consequence of their rejection of God as their Creator and Lord they are now subject to the wrath of God. “Wherefore as by one man sin entered the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Rom 5:12), and having sinned in Adam they are now by nature born dead in trespasses and sins (Eph 2:1). They are “children of disobedience” (Eph: 2:2); and “… by nature the children of wrath” (Eph 2:3). They walk “in the vanity of their mind,” “having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart” (Eph 4:18). Paul speaks of fallen man as having a “carnal mind,” and says that “… to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Rom 8:6).

Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge. (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1969).

Now, simply calling Brown a fool would not make for a great debate. But anytime a Christian speaks to an unbeliever, it is important to see them, as God sees them; and to remember that such were we (1 Corinthians 6:11).

So, why discuss evidence at all? John Frame suggests:

As “Reformed epistemologists” have emphasized, we do legitimately believe most things without proof or argument. This is obviously the case with young children, but it is also the case with adults, and with some of our fundamental beliefs: the belief that there is an external world beyond our own mind, the belief that other people have minds like ours, the belief that the future will resemble the past, and so on. I also agree with the Reformed epistemologists that it is quite legitimate for someone to believe in Christ without basing that belief on some argument or other. The Spirit creates faith in the heart, as we have seen, and that faith may or may not arise through an argumentative process. I do believe that faith is always (logically, not causally) based on evidence. Romans 1:18–32 makes clear that the evidence of the natural world yields knowledge of God in every human being, a knowledge that many suppress. But argument is not strictly necessary for faith. The importance of apologetics, then, is not that one can’t believe without it; it is rather that apologetic arguments can articulate and confirm the knowledge of God that we all have from creation.

John M. Frame, “Presuppositional Apologetics” In , in Five Views on Apologetics, ed. Stanley N. Gundry and Steven B. Cowan, Zondervan Counterpoints Collection (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000), 215-16.

All this being said (and I will have to say more on this later), given the foundations for the arguments, I believe that the Christian won the debate. I would like to see a debate at the philosophical level that challenges the presuppositions of atheism. It might not, at this time, have a mass-appeal to students, but these questions will not go away.