by Melissa Travis (Hard-Core Christianity)
In November I had the privilege of speaking to the Texas A&M University Ratio Christi chapter. It was my first time addressing students on a university campus, and it was a fantastic experience.
There was a great turnout for the meeting, despite the fact that finals are quickly approaching. I presented on the proper relationship of science and Christianity, and used the theological and scientific case for a literal Adam as my model.
As the previous few entries have shown, there is a massive amount of evidence that shows that Luke, the Greek-educated physician, wrote an accurate historical account in Acts. The book describes a long series of sailing terms, locations, people groups, wind directions, rules for Roman guards, geographical landmarks, titles of leaders, and cities. All this is further supported by the extremely educated style of Greek that the author used (see the first 4 verses of Luke in Greek), and the fact that many eyewitnesses were still alive that could have refuted the accounts if they were inaccurate (see Luke 1:2). The best evidence shows that Luke and Acts were composed by 60 A.D., within one generation of the events of Jesus’ life. The books are so well attested historically and archeologically that they have more support than any other book in ancient history. The support for the accuracy of Luke is documented in the voluminous references in Colin Hemer’s book. There is no conceivable way that Luke/Acts could have been written by anyone other than someone living in the region in the first century.
More facts from the Book of Acts which were verified from independent sources outside the bible. These appear in Colin Hemer’s book The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History. Conclusion to come in part 3.
21. Correct depiction of philosophical debate at the agora (17:17).
22. The correct Athenian slang epithet for Paul (spermologos) (17:18-19).
23. The correct name for the court area (areis pagos) (17:19).
24. An accurate depiction of the character of the Athenians (17:21).
25. Correct title for a member of the court (Aereopogite) (17:34).
26. Correct identification of Gallio as proconsul (18:12).
27. Correct identification of the judgment seat at the forum at Corinth (18:16).
28. Correct identification of the school of Tyranmus (19:9).
29. The correct identification of the cult of Artemis of the Ephesians (19:24, 27).
30. The correct identification of the theater at Ephesus as the meeting place (19:29).
In the bible, the books of Acts and Luke were written by the same person (see the first few verses of each book). Both include very, very large amount of historical details that can be independently verified with secular sources outside the Bible. Below is a partial list.
Today many areas of our culture reject logic and reason. In the name of tolerance and pluralism many people have no trouble with maintaining that contradictory truth claims can be true. We also have a case where the philisophical underpinnings of our system are crumbling. Few people study the reasons why we believe what we do, so the historical beliefs are being lost, including religious and secular beliefs.
Even in philosophy, after some of the modern problems in epistemology, we have a widespread belief that there is no foundation for knowledge. It seems that clinical skepticism will rise (a term I use to distinguish it from popular skepticism, a la the popular skeptical magazines, which are only skeptical of certain things).
The Vertical Cosmological Argument has various forms and is rather conceptual, but can be described as:
1. Everything in the universe is contingent (they could “not exist”).
2. All contingent things need an ongoing cause to sustain them.
3. Therefore the universe needs an ongoing cause to sustain it.
In the the book Who Really Cares — America’s Charity Divide Arthur C. Brooks has published the results of research done comparing beliefs with charitable giving. According to Brooks’ research, the following is true:
“The churchgoing woman will be 21 percentage points more likely to make a charitable gift during the year than the non-churchgoer, and she will be 26 points more likely to volunteer. Furthermore, she will tend to give $1,383 more per year to charity, and to volunteer on 6.4 more occasions.”
and Brooks continued,
“People who pray every day (whether or not they go to church) are 30 percentage points more likely to give money to charity than people who never pray (83 to 53 percent). And people who say they devote “a great deal of effort” to their spiritual lives are 42 points more likely to give than those devoting “no effort” (88 to 46 percent). Even a belief in beliefs themselves is associated with charity. People who say “beliefs don’t matter as long as you’re a good person” are dramatically less likely to give charitably (69 to 86 percent) and to volunteer (32 to 51 percent) than people who think that beliefs do matter.”
Now when I read this, I thought of William J. Federer’s work American Quotations (CD ROM version), which is an extremely lengthy (!) collection of quotations from throughout American history giving the positions of American leaders on religion, given in their own words without comment. Federer quotes the constitutions from most, if not all, of the 50 states, as they were founded. What was interesting to me was that the state constitutions, as originally written, included freedom of religion for everyone, but specifically rejected atheists from being on juries. I can only assume it was because they felt that people can believe in God any way they pleased, but didn’t want people deciding the fate of court cases in the current world when they don’t believe in a life after this one that includes a final judgment for one’s actions while here. If people don’t believe their maker will require of them an eternal price for their current actions, then those people were viewed as not having a motivation to be trusted on juries.
Of course, our society today views this as quaint and outmoded. Many years of shrill complaints from atheists and secularists have told us that they can be fair, even though they don’t believe in natural law, don’t believe in eternal judgment, and do believe in relativistic morals. After all these years of being told this, we’ve come to believe them. Unfortunately, Brooks’ research into charitable giving casts a large shadow on the ability of people to give a hoot about people in the here and now if they don’t believe they’ll see them again in the great by-and-by.
And my anecdotal experience proves this out. I have yet to see an “Atheist General Hospital” but I’ve seen plenty of hospitals named Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, St. Luke’s, St. Jude’s, and on and on. As far as I know, there are no Atheist Prison Fellowship organizations or Atheist Soup Kitchens, for all those are run by the Christians. I’ve never seen anything such as a Darwin Center for To Enhance the Reproduction of the Poor, Weak, and Infirm.
According to Brooks’ hard, cold, empirical data, people who believe that this life is all that matters tend to only focus on themselves in this life. This should be no surprise to us.
I’m going to try an experiment. It’s not a very well-thought out experiment, so I’ll admit up front that if it blows up in my face, I’ll look a bit sheepish. But it won’t be the first time, so here goes.
Here’s the background: It strikes me that a common tactic of the atheists and skeptics is to throw out a criticism, then sit back and wait for the theists to respond, then they throw out another criticism. This makes a nice fun game, if you’re an atheist or skeptic. It turns us apologists into a duck in a shooting gallery: every time someone shoots, we change directions, and they have fun watching us respond. When we give a reasonable answer, we never hear, “sorry about that, I guess I was wrong.” No, all we hear is another criticism. Since most of the criticisms are just that…….criticisms, and not positive cases for atheism or skepticism, I’m going to issue this challenge. Since it’s my challenge, I can make the rules any way I want. (Hey, if you don’t like it, make up your own challange……we get them thrown at us all the time.) Here’s the rules:
1. Come up with a positive case for your view, be it atheism, skepticism or whatever. I want a positive proof for your view, not an opinion about mine.
2. You can’t use alleged errors in the Bible. Even if they were there (which they aren’t), there are plenty of negative criticisms of the Bible in the world. Again, I’m looking for positive proof for your view, not another weak statement like “You Christians can’t explain XYZ" or "The Bible is wrong because XXX."
3. You can’t use the moral character, intelligence, or crimes of theists. (those shouldn’t have anything to do with a positive proof for your view.)
4. I won’t accept any logical fallacies, such as ad hominem statements against the other side (that means no arguments that depend on name-calling, guilt by association, self-refuting arguments, etc.).
Now with those simple rules, I think I’ve taken away the favorite hobby-horses that most of you use to have fun shooting at us. This challenge is about presenting a logical or empirical proof for why atheism, skepticism, or naturalism should be believed. The burden of proof is on you.
But I warn you in advance: all the tools you guys have been using since Hume, Freud, and Feurbach will cut both ways.
(btw, an excellent and similar post by Greg Koukle can be found here. )
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren on February 14, 1954, in Time magazine, stated:
“I believe no one can read the history of our country … without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Saviour have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses. … Whether we look to the first Charter of Virginia … or to the Charter of New England … or to the Charter of Massachusetts Bay … or to the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut … the same objective is present: a Christian land governed by Christian principles. …
I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it: freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition, the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of the home, equal justice under the law, and the reservation of powers to the people. …
I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country.”
If evolution were true, would we not have to apply it to ethics? What was once ethical would be replaced by what enhances survival, and a new set of ethics would win out over the old set. Further, the strong would survive, and the weak would get eliminated. So there would be nothing wrong with the strong clubbing to death the weak so they could reproduce, or keeping the weak as slaves so the strong could survive better. What would ultimately be wrong with the strong stealing the food from the starving weak? What has been called “herd instinct” would not suffice, for while it might be a nice hypothetical, it begs the question on survival and does not prove anything, let alone disprove a relativistic view of ethics based solely on survival. At best, the herd instinct theory is no more logical of a theory as clubbing innocents to death for their food, and in a herd, such a thing might be done “for the betterment of the herd.” Why not an evolutionary view of ethics, where the ethical system is constantly being improved by natural selection, so that the weak are left to die and the strong survive? Why could it not be the case that ethics evolve so that what is ethical this year is non-ethical in the future, due to one set of ethics surviving over another? It would seem that those who deny a moral law giver, God, are forced into a dilemma: either ethics evolve over time and are relativistic to the society they are in, and therefore are not objective and permanent, or ethics are indeed objective and universal, and apply to all people, places, and times. If the latter, the non-theist must supply a basis for universal objective morality that is based in pure matter and energy. This a task they cannot do, for as John Lennox has pointed out, the tools of physics and chemistry are insufficient to measure anything outside of physics and chemistry, such as determining justice.
Civilized societies reject the idea that the weak should be eliminated, and rightly so, for the natural law that God put in all men screams that this is wrong. The few times in history that a society has tried to adapt such a view are so notable of exceptions to as to prove the rule.
So have ethics evolved, and are they continuing to evolve? Or are some things right for all times and all people?
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