Our Pastor is very well read, and he takes an intellectual approach to the Christian faith.
My family's pastor is also very well read. I actually prefer my old pastor, who was of average intelligence, but who was full of the spirit, and who based his sermons on the bible, and did not attempt to dress it up with references to erudite thinkers.
Consider Matthew 13:3-9
13:3 Then he told them many things in parables, saying: "A farmer went out to sow his seed. 4 As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop--a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. 9 He who has ears, let him hear."
The farmer didn't change his seed, or the way he tended the seed, in this parable. To me, this is evidence that ultimately, packaging the word is not necessary. Rather, a pastor should pray to be led to fertile soil, and spread the seed. Christian apologetics is not necessary, and I wonder if it is ever productive.
But I'm sticking with the new church, which is in the same synod, because it is closer to my home, and I do receive good guidance, and do not object to the doctrine. The church is not the preacher, and I am not the judge. Besides, lately, our new pastor has been basing his sermons more on the Bible than learned arguments for the way.
And, there is no perfect preacher anyway-though I would prefer to attend a church led by a tentmaker-that is, somebody who earns his living and also preaches. I certainly have my own logs to remove from my own eyes.
BTW, I don't mean to imply your pastor doesn't base his sermons on the bible. He does recommend that we go to the scriptures, so he might agree with me. I agree with his point that we should seek an accurate "God view" based on the Bible.
"Christian apologetics is not necessary, and I wonder if it is ever productive."
I *very strongly* disagree with this statement.
There is *nothing* more irritating than asking a question of a religious leader and being told "you must just have faith, my son".
Blind faith irrates me beyond belief. I can have faith that my dog can fly because he's "full of the spirit", but that doesn't make it so.
I have no idea why apologetics would be a negative thing....it's merely an intense look at scripture and researching the evidence for our faith.
I've known Pastors who reject this approach, and it's my belief that they are a huge turn off to many seekers. Why choose Christianity above any other faith based belief system??? If there is *no* evidence supporting your belief, what's the point?
And, why would it be wrong to share apologetic arguments when they are easily supported with biblical truth??
I think people come to their religious beliefs in different ways...some are led by emotion. Others want to know *why* they should believe..they want something concrete to base their faith upon.
Every religion is based upon an aspect of faith...just many naturalists put their faith in science, but just like science, there are paths of evidence to follow on your journey for religious truth.
Here is the deal.
We already accept almost everything on faith. For example, how far is the sun from the Earth?
Have you have taken a measurement?
Probably not, unless you took an astronomy class at a good university.
Correction: You have probably taken the measurement. When you drive down the street, on a partly cloudy day, you may see rays emanating from the sun through the atmosphere. You will see an angle between two different rays, and the angle will, if you measured it, and used a little trigonometry, show that the sun is much closer than 93,000,000,000.
Yet, if you ask most educated people, perhaps yourself included, who have not taken astronomy, and have not used telescopes to measure parallactic shift, how far the sun is from the Earth, they will repeat, on faith, and despite their lying eyes, that the sun is about 93,000,000,000 miles away.
Faith is everywhere, not just in religion.
Apologetics is interesting, but it cannot even bolster faith, because if your faith depends on apologetics, you have no faith.
Tough to swallow, I know. I used to look for reasons to believe, too (and still do occasionally).
Instead, be like a child, and believe.
My faith does not depend soley on apologetics....though, apologetics *certainly* stengthens my faith *immensely*.
No where is it written in scripture that we much believe by faith alone. And, wisdom is highly regarded throughout scripture...not focused on intellect so much as the ability to reason logically about religious truth.
What was Jesus' reply when he was asked about the greatest commandment?
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."
Faith alone is a very dangerous thing, IMHO. That is where you run into Jim Jones et. al. and the Koolaid factor.
William,
You have neglected the fact that light is bent as it enters the atmosphere, just as light bends when it enters water. This happens at the barrier between any two media, and it is called refraction. When the light enters a more dense medium, it causes object to appear closer than they really are. Not to mention scattering, reflection, diffraction, etc.
BTW, the sun is 93,000,000 miles away, not 93,000,000,000. So you did get one thing right: the sun is closer to the earth than 93,000,000,000 miles.
Rob,
Thanks Rob, I've had physics. I wasn't arguing that the sun wasn't 93,000,000 miles away. (Where did those extra 0s come from--sry).
My point was that people believe in science as much as anything. They have faith that the laws of nature don't change. I wasn't trying to explain natural phenomena, but was pointing out that most people take on faith what they see in documentaries in opposition to what they see.
My main point: religion is a matter of faith. If you disagree with me, you're not alone: Richard Dawkins asserts that the existence of God is a scientific question.
Sorry William, I totally misunderstood your point.
Zeros, der evrywhr.
Yes, we all take things as a matter of faith. The difference between science and religion is that my faith in some scientific fact or observation can be confirmed, the observation replicated. You take the existence of God on faith, whereas you cannot confirm existence by experiment or observation.
If I wanted, and if I had enough time, I could make a measurement of the distance to the sun by observing the transit of Venus, along with a little trigonometry.
I do not believe that the existence of God can be proven, and since I choose not to believe in things that cannot be observed, even in very indirect ways, I do not believe in supernatural beings.
Best regards,
Rob
"I do not believe that the existence of God can be proven, and since I choose not to believe in things that cannot be observed, even in very indirect ways, I do not believe in supernatural beings."
Since we're getting philosophical, you and I agree that the existence of God cannot be proven through logical argumentation, though you might go further.
In line with Popper's writings on the subjects, non-trivial scientific theories, or facts, cannot be proven, either, in that no number of observations can ever prove a scientific theory, or fact. Observations can only corroborate the theory, or disprove it.
Nevertheless, you likely believe in evolution, despite the truthfulness, in a logical sense, of the statement I just made. Evolution cannot be proven either. But you believe, based on evidence in the form of relatively scanty observations, or accounts of those scanty observations, weaved together to form a narrative.
Proof has nothing to do with what you believe. And observation is not proof.
Yet, imagine you live in a hypothetical universe much like the one we live in, in which God, a supernatural creator, exists, and where supernatural jubilations emanate from every thing, from the most elementary of particles, to the largest of galaxies, from the simplest life form to the most complex, from the smallest quanta of energy to the largest supernova.
Would you notice?
Could you even notice?
Hundreds of thousands of fossils is hardly scanty. Neither are dozens of transitional fossils. Whether you admit to it or not, the evidence for common descent is considered by the vast majority of scientists as overwhelming. As I have said before, it would take only one or two key observations to throw a wrench into the whole evolutionary works, and those observations have not, and will not, be made. Evolutionary theory is disprovable. Find a dinosaur with a mammalian skeleton in its stomach and poof! There goes the theory.
When the evidence for a theory is overwhelming and there is no evidence to the contrary, the theory is considered a fact. Evolution and common descent is a fact, just as atomic theory is a fact. There is no evidence that contradicts the major tenents of either theory.
I know I am not going to argue this in a way that you will admit to be convincing. I don't have to. I do not believe in evolutionary theory, I accept it as fact, just as I do many other scientific theories.
Theories undergo revision continually, and what is considered the most reasonable answer can change. This does nothing to make a theory less sound. I teach a controversial issue in my organic chemistry course, the explanation of which has alternated between two different theories over the years. Current thinking, based on very high level calculations, point to one explanation as likely being correct. What doesn't change is the fact of the actual observation.
Observations are facts. The molecular formula of benzene is C6H6. This is both an observation (measurement) and a fact. The theory of aromaticity is considered a fact, because there is no evidence to contradict current thinking on the matter.
With respect to proving or disproving the existence of God, neither can be accomplished. However, it is up to the religionists to argue for their God, not for atheists to argue against God. Most atheists find arguments for God unconvincing. For me, it is as simple as that. It just does not make logical sense to me that a supernatural being exists in the manner described in the Bible or in any other book or cultural tradition.
In any event, I always enjoy debating with you, as you make me think.
Have a good day.
Thanks.
I have to respond later...got stuff to do in the real world. But briefly, on the side topic, accepting for the sake of argument the existence dozens of accurately classified transitional fossils--dozens of observations divided by the number of transitions postulated by the theory of evolution is infinitesimally scanty, in my estimation. Yes, the fossil record is itself sparse, but given the way the evolutionary tree of life is organized, it seems reasonable to expect orders of magnitude additional observations.
You expect them at this point in time. Now. 2008. What about 2018 or 2028? Do you think there will be more of both? What about 2108? The number of fossils and the number of transitional fossils increase constantly. Discoveries are not going to cease.
BTW, doesn't it seem weird to write 2028? I can't get past the '00s.
Rob...interpretation of those "transitionals" vary. If you're predisposed to evolutionary indoctrination, you're going to view everything as a transitional. If you stand back and look at the evidence with an unbiased lens, you'd have to admit the "evidence" is pretty lame.
I know some of you hate to go to my links, but I, OTOH, hate repeating myself ad nauseam. There are some examples of macroevolutionary “transitionals” at this link. The whale transitional series is critiqued in a few of the links in that post.
Quotes for lurkers:
HERE.
If commenters squeal "quote mining", your comments won't go through. If readers doubt these quotes, look them up within their context.
Relevant UD article. Most of these "transitionals" are malarky....trumped up just so stories...
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