Imagination and storytelling are very powerful ways of drawing attention to important ideas and questions. A good book or movie provokes people to think in a way unlike hearing a lecture. This is one reason why Jesus spoke in parables. With a much-anticipated new chapter of the generation-spanning Star Wars saga about to unfold in theaters, RTB editor Maureen Moser…
Originally published in Reasons to Believe’s ezine, New Reasons to Believe, vol. 2, no. 1 (2010) Great evil has been done in the name of Christ. This charge, a frequent objection to historic Christianity raised especially by the new atheist authors,1 typifies discussions of such historical events as the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Salem witch trials. While characterizing…
As some two billion Christians around the world prepare to celebrate Easter Sunday—the commemoration of Jesus Christ’s historical resurrection from the dead—it occurred to me that one way to think about one’s worldview is to look at it in terms of who or what has the last word. Let’s very briefly examine who’s got the last word according to atheistic…
Was Charles Darwin a confident evolutionist? It may be surprising to learn that the father of modern evolutionary theory had doubts about his proposed explanation for life’s diversity. Reflective by nature, Darwin (1809–1882) worried about the philosophical implications of his biological theory. One concern was whether humanity’s cognitive (belief-producing) faculties—which he believed had evolved from the lower animals—could be trusted…
Excerpted from my upcoming book, 7 Truths that Changed the World (Baker 2012) Theists and atheists do reason differently about God and the world. A common skeptical objection to the enterprise of Christian apologetics is that believers engage in a god-of-the-gaps form of reasoning. This charge means that the Christian theist typically attributes gaps in (especially) scientific knowledge to something…
Christopher Hitchens, author, journalist, and one of the “four horsemen” of the New Atheist movement, died December 15, 2011, of esophageal cancer. In his 2007 book God is Not Great, Hitchens argued that religions in general—and theistic religion in particular (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam)—are not only false but also harmful for human society. Ironically, Christopher’s younger brother Peter, also a…
Reflections 