J.P. Moreland: Why the Church Must Overcome Its Aversion to Intellectual Development

One job of the church is to be salty to the world in which it finds itself, so if that world grows saltless, we should look first to the church herself to glean what we can about her contribution to the situation. ... A major cause of our current cultural crisis consists of a worldview shift from a Judeo-Christian understanding of reality to a post-Christian one. Moreover, this shift itself expresses a growing anti-intellectualism in the church, resulting in the marginalization of Christianity in society—its lack of saltiness, if you will—and the emergence of the most secular culture the world has ever seen. That secular culture is now simply playing out the implications of ideas that have come to be widely accepted in a social context in which the church is no longer a major participant in the war of ideas.1 In the rest of this book, then, I’ll try to demonstrate how the church must overcome the neglect of this critical area of the development of the Christian mind, perhaps the most integral component of the believers’ sanctification. The role of intellectual development is primary in evangelical Christianity, but you might not know that from a cursory look at the church today. In spite of this, if we are to have Christ formed in us (Galatians 4:19), we must realize the work of God in our minds and pay attention to what a Christlike mind might look like. As our Savior has said, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" (Matthew 22:37). To do this, we cannot neglect the soulful development of a Christian mind.

 J. P.Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul. 2nd Ed. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2012. Print.

Questions for Skeptics: Why Aren't You More Skeptical of Your Morality? (Video)

A lot of skeptics object to the God of the Bible as being cruel, intolerant, genocidal, or worse. All of these claims hinge on a specific moral position, though. How does the skeptic know that he or she has the appropriate moral high ground? From where does their morality stem?

In this short video, Lenny discusses the problem of moral grounding and asks why these skeptics don't question their own moral position in the same way they question God's.

A Lot of Hand-Waving by Evolutionists

In college, I was a physics major. In physics, we sought to provide some precise answers to specific data presented to us. For example, we know that a car turning a corner must rely on a certain amount of friction to turn a corner. We want to know how to calculate this so we can set safe speed limits on corners. In chemistry, we seek to know just what is happening when iron rusts or an acid and a base are combined. In medicine we seek to know exactly why someone who suffers from Sickle cell disease. Doctors have traced the problem back to a single DNA point mutation which then changes the coding of a single amino acid.1 This is pure science, seeking to find an answer while examining the details.

Of course, not all science can be done in this way. There are fields such as plate tectonics that take observed data and use them to create models of how the different plates of the earth's crust will affect each other. Still, these models attempt to be very specific in just what is moving and how, and it's this specificity that makes the difference in the explanatory value of any theory. The devil's in the details, as it were.

What's Needed to Make a Whale

Yet, when I talk with proponents of evolution, the discussions are different. Yesterday, I engaged again in an exchange with a proponent of evolution. I asked his again to provide a definition, to which he replied "Evolution Is Change in the Inherited Traits of a Population through Successive Generations" (borrowing the title from this web site.) But, as I wrote yesterday, that's not a very useful definition. Just because things change doesn't mean we get new biological systems. Men can be four feet tall or seven feet tall, but not 12 inches tall or 12 feet tall. Those who inherit the sickle cell trait are immune from malaria, but their children are at risk of a painful life and an early death. Even here, the inherited immunity isn't a new feature, but a crippling of a functioning system.

So, I ask for specifics. I offered the humpback whale as an example. Supposedly, the whale evolved from a land mammal over the course of about 10-12 million years.2 One may try to explain the size increase by simple growth over time, (although a recent article in the journal Science says that such an explanation fails), there are still a huge amount of systems that must be changed for a land-dwelling mammal to change into an ocean-dwelling one. The nose must be migrated to the top of the head and turned into a blow hole. Breathing is no longer automatic but must take conscious effort. Walking limbs must be transformed into flippers. The kidneys must be changed to handle the intake of salt water. Testes must be located inside the body to keep warm. The young must be able to nurse under water, and on and on.3

How Much Change Does that Take?

You may imagine that changing one body part into something different, like a nose into a blowhole would take quite a bit of DNA rearrangement. These morphological changes not only have to all happen, but they have to happen together, for a blowhole isn't going to help if you are breathing without thinking. The animal will simply drown. But even more problematic, the vast number of changes to the DNA must happen within that relatively short window of 10-12 million years because that's what the fossil record shows. If whales came from the land mammal pakicetus, then using the traditional dating of fossils found, all these changes must take place with what would be on an evolutionary timeline, a very brief span.

Thu, my question to my interrogator was simple how quickly would the mutations of DNA have had to happen to produce all of the necessary changes to get the whale from its supposed ancestor? Does any natural selection and genetic mutation that we observe now correlate to those changes? One must remember that we aren't taking about bacteria that reproduce very quickly and have very large populations. Mammals like pakicetus are the same size as a large dog, which means that they might reproduce only after a year or two upon maturation and produce a few litters. With a smaller population and more time between generations, evolution via mutation is made even more difficult.

So, what's the model? Where's the math? What's the actual number of beneficial mutations posited generation to make this kind of a transition? I was met with nothing but obfuscation. It was all hand-waving, and talk of me supposedly ignoring "hundreds of years of hard scientific work." This is what I find all the time in discussions of evolution. Everyone claims it's an established fact, but no one offers the details. Dawkins speaks of cells that morph into light-sensitive ones, then become aligned, and eventually we get the human eye.4 However he never gives us just which genes changed, how many would've needed to change, or how fast it would have to occur. It's a just-so story that has no numbers behind it. Modern proponents seem a little too light on the details to say evolution is of the same type of knowledge as the earth revolving around the sun.5 We have the formula for gravity. We have silence regarding genetic changes.

References

1. "Sickle Cell Disease." Genetics Home Reference. National Library of Medicine, Aug. 2012. Web. 11 Feb. 2015. http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/sickle-cell-disease.
2. "Going Aquatic: Cetacean Evolution." PBS. PBS, 21 Mar. 2012. Web. 19 Feb. 2015. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/ocean-giants-going-aquatic-cetacean-evolution/7577/.
3. Andrews, Max. "Darwinian Whale Evolution." Sententias. Sententias, 06 Feb. 2012. Web. 20 Feb. 2015. http://sententias.org/2012/02/06/darwinian-whale-evolution/#more-1563. See also Richard Sternberg's video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbAzZEu13_w
4. Dawkins, Richard. Climbing Mount Improbable (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996), 140-178.
5. "Is Evolution a Theory or a Fact?" Evolution Resources from the National Academies. U.S. National Academy of Sciences., 2013. Web. 12 Feb. 2015. http://www.nas.edu/evolution/TheoryOrFact.html.

What Do You Mean by Evolution?

I've recently had a couple of conversations where someone sought to challenge my questioning of the modern assumption that evolution is a proven fact. One person commented to me "To disbelieve in the theory of evolution requires a suspension of reason so extreme as to be almost pathological." That's a pretty big claim! However, in the broad topic of evolution, the devil is in the details. In fact, for most complex scientific theories, the devil is in the details. Newtonian laws work really well to describe the actions of most things in motion, but when you get down to the sub-atomic level they don't work. That's why whenever I'm challenged by someone by such an assertion, I think it becomes crucial to first make sure you define your terms.

"Change Over Time" Is Unproblematic

One of the biggest problems in causal discussions over evolution is that the word has become so plastic, it can mean almost anything. When someone asks "Do you believe in evolution," I first ask "What exactly do you mean by evolution?" For example, in my conversation, I received the definition of evolution as "inherited traits [that] vary across a population with time." If that's all evolution is supposed to be, then I wouldn't disagree with it. All the breeds of dogs we see are from inherited traits varying across the population with time. Bacteria can and do develop resistances to antibiotics. These things are not controversial in the least.

Physicist Gerald Schroeder makes a salient point here:

The magnificent Natural History Museum in London devotes an entire wing to demonstrating the fact of evolution. They show how pink daises can evolve into blue daises, how gray moths can change into black moths, how over a mere few thousand years, a wide variety of cichlid fish species evolved in Lake Victoria. It is all impressive.

Impressive until you walk out and reflect upon that which they were able to document.Daisies remained daises, moths remained moths, and cichlid fish remained cichlid fish.These changes are referred to as micro-evolution.In this exhibit, the museum's staff did not demonstrate a single unequivocal case in which life underwent a major gradual morphological change.1

Yes, change over time happens. Populations become taller, fatter, and balder. But that is neither controversial nor very interesting when discussing the issues of God or why there is so much diversity in life and still so many biological systems seem perfectly designed for their environments.

Competing Definitions

In an article written for Evolution News a couple of years ago, David Klinghoffer quoted form Jay Westley Richards on some of the multiple meanings the word evolution takes on in discussions. He notes six that were first identified by Stephen Meyer and Michael Keas:

1. Change over time; history of nature; any sequence of events in nature.

2. Changes in the frequencies of alleles in the gene pool of a population.

3. Limited common descent: the idea that particular groups of organisms have descended from a common ancestor.

4. The mechanisms responsible for the change required to produce limited descent with modification, chiefly natural selection acting on random variations or mutations.

5. Universal common descent: the idea that all organisms have descended from a single common ancestor.

6. "Blind watchmaker" thesis: the idea that all organisms have descended from common ancestors solely through unguided, unintelligent, purposeless, material processes such as natural selection acting on random variations or mutations; that the mechanisms of natural selection, random variation and mutation, and perhaps other similarly naturalistic mechanisms, are completely sufficient to account for the appearance of design in living organisms.

Richards then adds two more:

There is also the metaphorical sense of evolution, in which Darwinian Theory is used as a template to explain things other than nature, like the rise and fall of civilizations or sports careers…

Finally, there's evolution in the sense of "progress" or "growth." Natural evolution has often been understood in this way, so that cosmic history is interpreted as a movement toward greater perfection, complexity, mind, or spirit. A pre-Darwinian understanding of "evolution" was the idea of a slow unfolding of something that existed in nascent form from the beginning, like an acorn eventually becoming a great oak tree. If anything, this sense of evolution tends toward theism rather than away from it, since it suggests a purposive plan.2

Of course, not all of these will be applicable in your discussions with others on evolution. However, it does show how fungible the word has come to be. Asking with model of evolutionary theory can help take some of the imprecision out of the discussion and it helps to make sure that the ones challenging you knows what they are talking about, too.

References 

1. Dembski, William A., and Sean McDowell. Understanding Intelligent Design. Eugene, Or.: Harvest House, 2008. Print. 48.

2. Klinghoffer, David. "The Eight Meanings of Evolution." Evolution News & Views. Evolution News & Views, 26 Aug. 2011. Web. 19 Feb. 2015.
Image courtesy Aaron "tango" Tang and licensed by the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.

Unlikely Candidates for Gospel Writers

Do you ever remember cutting class in High School? Perhaps there was an event you wanted to attend, so you decided to ditch one day. The problem with ditching school is the ever-present danger of being caught. Teachers take attendance and they want to know why you missed class when you show up the next day. A lot of kids I knew would simply forge an absence note from their mother or father to escape detection.

Why do kids forge notes from their parents, but not the next-door neighbor or a sibling? Usually, it is because it would make the note a whole lot less believable. If a neighbor signed the note, the student would be forced to go to much greater lengths to demonstrate he or she was in the neighbor's care or the neighbor had some legal authority over the child. It complicates things and makes people ask questions in a way that the more widely-recognized authority of the mother and father don't.

Why Forge These Guys' Names?

I bring this point up as I wrap down my little series on the authorship of the Gospels. While it is agreed that the original authors of the gospels didn't sign their names to them (something not uncommon when dealing with a popular level biographical account in the ancient world), they have always been attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In fact, that's a big point. Those who are skeptical will usually claim that no one knows who wrote any of the gospels. They were anonymous and the names they now bear were attached later. Yet, the gospels themselves claim to come from eyewitness testimony (Luke 1:1-3, John 21:24) and ancient biographers sought out eyewitnesses as the best type of evidence. Richard Bauckham, comments that historian Samuel Byrskog stresses that "for Greek and Roman historians, the ideal eyewitness was not the dispassionate observer but one who, as a participant, had been closest to the events and those who direct experience enabled him to understand and interpret the significance of what he had seen. The historians 'preferred the eyewitness who was socially involved or, even better, had actively participated in the events.'"1

Given that involved eyewitnesses would be considered more valuable, then one would imagine that these anonymously-written accounts would offer some more significant apostolic names to be associated with them. Two of the four gospels aren't even names of the apostles: Mark and Luke. Isn't this a bit like picking the next door neighbor to write your absence note? It takes more explaining and weakens the case for their authenticity. Of the two gospels that do bear the names of apostles, Matthew is more relatively obscure apostle, not an Andrew or Peter or James. Only John's gospel account bears the name of one of the "inner circle" of apostles, and his is the one that shows up last. If the pattern was to forge the names onto the Gospels, why wait until John to pick a prominent apostle, unless Matthew, Mark , and Luke actually did write their own Gospels?

No Other Choices

Not only do we have some relatively obscure authors chosen for three of the four gospels, we also notice that there has never been any alternatives offered for the sources of the Gospels. Compare that to a truly anonymous book of the New Testament: the book of Hebrews. Early writers like Eusebius and Athanasius attribute the book to the Apostle Paul. Origen seems to have some misgivings about that, writing "For not without reason have the ancients handed it down as Paul's. But who wrote the epistle, in truth, God knows" (Eccl. History 6.25.13-14). Other possibilities like Silas, Timothy, or Apollos have also been offered, yet the book remains anonymous. The same is not true of the gospels; they are always and confidently ascribed to these four authors and no other possibility is ever advanced. Further, when the second century produced a flurry of forged gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter, these were summarily rejected because they were forgeries. There does not exist any ancient list or writing offering as authoritative any accounts of Jesus's life other than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This is strong evidence that the early church fathers were critical of claims that an apostle wrote a book without any good supporting evidence for it that ties it all the way back to the apostles themselves.

What's More Reasonable?

Given all that we know about the gospels, the testimony of people like Papias who sought to establish their relation to the eyewitnesses, the internal testimony and claims that they were written by eyewitnesses, and the lack of other options, it is more reasonable to hold that the gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John than to believe they are forgeries.

References

1. Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2006. Print. 9.