If we grant the atheist’s premise that God cannot permit gratuitous evil in this world, then what happens when a culture or an entire civilization becomes a gratuitous evil?
Why We Have No Idea What God Should Allow
Every event, no matter how small, causes an exponentially increasing number of consequences, spreading to countless causal chains in future history to the end of time. The result it that we are in no position at all to judge what God should, and should not, allow.
Why this scientist believes intelligent design was required for biological life
Science is now in a position to analyze effects to see if they test positive for requiring intelligence to produce. Applying that scientific method to biological life reveals that the fingerprints of intelligence are all over the genomes of life.
Finding healing in the face of overwhelming grief
Although I have found many excellent online resources for coping with grief, almost none of them mention what I have found to be the two most important things that have been enormously helpful for me.
Why a Perfectly Just God Will Seem Unjust
Since we judge other people according to our own sense of justice, when we disagree with another person’s sense of justice, they will appear unjust to us. If our sense of justice is not perfect, we are likely to disagree with some aspects of perfect justice. Therefore, a perfectly just God will seem unjust to us.
Why evil and injustice point to the existence of God
Just as it makes no sense to talk about a high crime rate if there are no laws to break, in the same way we cannot take evil and injustice seriously unless there is some ultimate standard of beauty and goodness that is being violated.
What Does it Mean to be Human?: Part 2 - Vastly more than you can imagine
You have been created to be entrusted in eternity with enormous capabilities, in a world beyond anything that has entered the heart of humanity to imagine.
What Does it Mean to be Human?: Part 1 -- Implications of thinking you own your body
If you say, “this is my body”, then who and what is the “me” that owns it? The implications are massive.
Faith and Science: Part III -- Fantasy in modern science
How science fiction and fantasy have crept into modern science.
Faith and Science: Part II -- Inferential science ... what can go wrong?
As a scientist, I am often dismayed at the naive faith in science that I see in the general public, including Christian leaders, in their tacit assumption that if there is tension between science and faith, it is faith that must be questioned. In reality, the inductive inferences of science must be examined just as critically as interpretations of scripture.
Faith and Science: Part I -- Experimental science and implications for faith in science and God
Although experimental science poses no challenge to faith in God, it does send a strong warning to those who feel that faith in science trumps faith in God.
Why Did God Ask Abraham to Sacrifice His Son?
“I find a father holding a knife to his son’s throat to show his love to a totalitarian dictator wicked!” was the late atheist Christopher Hitchens’ response to the biblical account of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son. There is simply no reason to get upset about the story unless it is true, after all, we do not take seriously what a fictitious villain does in a faery tale. It only becomes worthy of being upset about if it actually happened, so let us accept the event as true and look at the account.
Life After Death
Something as important as this should not be solely the domain of the most intelligent … It should be simple enough to be grasped by a child, or a person with mental disabilities, or the completely uneducated.
The Religion that Began Before its Founder Appeared in History
We have a case in human history where a religion began thousands of years before its founder appeared. This is a highly unique phenomenon and suggests we take a closer look at that religion.
If God Made the Universe, What Made God?
In order to be the cause of time, God must necessarily be able to exist in a timeless state. It follows from this that God must be timeless, beginningless, and uncaused.
What Caused the Universe?
Just as a woman cannot give birth to herself, so nature cannot have brought itself into existence. If the origin and foundation of the physical world cannot be natural, then it must be something that is not-natural.
Did Time have a Beginning? -- My First Brush with Infinity
The beginning of time isn’t something people often ponder when sipping an Americano in a coffee shop, but they should … the philosophical implications are massive.