Fear and Trembling

MSNBC on Matt Chandler’s cancer. (Thanks to Mark Driscoll’s Facebook post of the link.)

Apologetics 315 has posted an excellent review of R. C. Sproul’s book If There is a God, Why Are There Atheists . The original book is, in part, an attack on the notion of Freud and Feuerbach that religion is just projection or wishful thinking. Here’s a taste of Sproul’s book courtesy of Apologetics 315: The Christian God has some ‘attractive’ features that might incline a person to embrace God as a narcotic to help him face the threatening character of life, but these are overwhelmingly outweighed by the trauma of encountering God. Though man may desire and create for himself a deity who meets his needs and provides him with innumerable benefits, he will not instinctively desire a God who is holy, omniscient, and sovereign. The Bible does not try to conceal the fact that, in spite of God’s love and mercy, He is an awesome, threatening Being, a Being that man would not instinctively search for. The psychologists continue to argue that men like to invent protective deities ...

Please see a nicely done animated summary of protein synthesis here . It’s narrated by Stephen Meyer , who authored Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design .

“What is the source of math and logic? The existence of this remarkably fine-tuned universe aside, how is it that we have these ‘languages of reality’ to so elegantly describe and interact with it.” - David F. Coppedge, “The World’s Greatest Creation Scientists” “The greatest scientists have been struck by how strange this is. There is no logical necessity for a universe that obeys rules, let alone one that abides by the rules of mathematics. This astonishment springs from the recognition that the universe doesn’t have to behave this way. It is easy to imagine a universe in which conditions change unpredictably from instant to instant, or even a universe in which things pop in and out of existence.” – Dinesh D/Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity? (Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2007, Chapter 11). One aspect of thinking is our ability to determine the internal consistency of ideas. We need to be able to know whether our thinking method itself is accurate. This is the realm of form...

I like Al Mohler’s take on the tragedy in Haiti : …Does God hate Haiti? God hates sin, and will punish both individual sinners and nations. But that means that every individual and every nation will be found guilty when measured by the standard of God's perfect righteousness. God does hate sin, but if God merely hated Haiti, there would be no missionaries there; there would be no aid streaming to the nation; there would be no rescue efforts -- there would be no hope. The earthquake in Haiti, like every other earthly disaster, reminds us that creation groans under the weight of sin and the judgment of God. This is true for every cell in our bodies, even as it is for the crust of the earth at every point on the globe. The entire cosmos awaits the revelation of the glory of the coming Lord. Creation cries out for the hope of the New Creation. In other words, the earthquake reminds us that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only real message of hope. The cross of Christ declare...

Thanks to Justin Talyor for this quote: “Saying “Preach the gospel; if necessary use words” is like saying “Tell me your phone number; if necessary use digits.”” – J. D. Greear

God is eternal. He has no beginning and no end. This is foundational for a popular argument for God’s existence. Reason demonstrates that something must have always existed. It is not possible to count to the end of the series of real numbers. We can always count one more. It is, in one sense, an infinite series of discrete things. We can’t count to the end of a string like that. It has no end. An unending series of discrete things cannot, after all, have an end. Similarly, we cannot expect that an infinite regress of finite causes exists either. That is, if we move backward from ourselves to the things that caused us, then backward to the things that caused them and so on, we must find something that did not have a beginning. Otherwise, the unending series of causes would have never arrived at us. The infinite regression cannot exist in reality. Whatever the first cause was, it must have always been and it must have the power and ability to bring about all we see in the univ...

I am astonished at some on the internet who accuse me of being happy / glad / satisfied / gleeful that God would send some people to hell. From Ray Comfort’s blog : Do you think "happy" would be the right word to use to describe that state of mind of those who were saved in the lifeboats of the Titanic as their loved ones and others were being swallowed into an icy grave? No doubt they were unspeakably grateful that they are saved, but it would be entirely inappropriate to use the word "happy" to describe their circumstance. There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not horrified at what’s in store for those who die in their sins… Ray says it well.