Category: Reasonable Answers to Honest Questions

I was recently interviewed by a student writing for the Stanford Daily. A group of off-campus Christians had put on a controversial outreach activity and he wanted to know why Christians share their faith. Apparently my answer wasn’t pithy or interesting enough, because I didn’t make it into the final article. 🙂

His questions (which he asked separately but which I combined for my answer): “Why do Christians try to spread their beliefs? With so many other problems in the world, why expend so much energy on spreading the gospels instead of, for example, feeding the hungry?”

My emailed response: 

Jesus said that he is the way, the truth, and the life — he even said that no one could come to God apart from him. So the same compassion that compels Christians to build hospitals and orphanages and feed the hungry also compels us to share the news that everyone can be reconciled to God through Christ.

In addition, we know that by spreading the gospel we also increase the number of people who are feeding the hungry and otherwise doing good deeds. We know from research that religious people give more to charity than nonreligious people do, and so we see that compassion and evangelism are not antithetical. If anything, they reinforce each other.

In summary, we share the gospel with someone because we believe that the gospel meets their deepest needs and will also catalyze them to likewise go meet the spiritual and practical needs of others. 

He asked me more questions than that, but I didn’t have time to answer them before his deadline. And even this answer was kind of rushed. If I had my answer to give over again I probably would have put a line about heaven and hell in there, but as it is I feel pretty good about it.

So if you’re not a Christian and wonder why we keep urging you to trust in Jesus, I hope my answer helps you understand our motives. We love you and we love Jesus, so we want to arrange an introduction.

I have a student taking a sociology of religion course right now, and she asked me for some advice on how to integrate what she’s learning in class with her faith. 

I thought this might be of interest to more students than just her, so here’s what I had to say (slightly modified from the email):

We need to meet face-to-face to talk this through, but I have some initial thoughts for you:

1) Many times we confuse description with explanation. To explain how something works is not to explain why it is. Clearly everything must work some way, and so interesting descriptions of everything ought to abound — I should be able to describe thinking, love, humor, and gravity. But that does not mean that I have understood the things I am describing interesting aspects of. For instance, I can describe the physics of golf in great detail, and then another scholar can come along and describe the rules of golf in great detail, and then a third scholar can come along and describe the history of golf in great detail. All of these descriptions may be accurate, but none of these descriptions will explain why I play golf. And none will capture what it feels like to play golf. And likely none of them, if written for a scholarly audience, will be of the slightest use to golfers desiring to hone their craft. Remember that there is a sociology of marriage, but should you become married one day you will discover that there is a level of reality that the sociological descriptions never adequately communicated.

2) If you assume there is no God at the beginning of your analysis then your analysis will not persuade me that there is no God, for how could it conclude anything else? It reminds me of a story Francis Collins told us last year: “A marine biologist casts a net into the lowest part of the ocean, brings up the catch, and analyzes it. He makes an amazing discovery: there is no creature at the bottom of the sea less than two inches in diameter! The problem, of course, is that his net has two inch holes. It is incapable of discovering anything smaller than its mesh.” In the same way, a methodology that rules out the supernatural from the beginning will never discover evidence of the supernatural. This should not be surprising at all.

3) There are some faith-friendly sociologists out there. Three worth
investigating are Rodney Stark free fear house

download first snow

sea of love dvd , Bradley Wright, and Christian Smith. Read some of their writings, particularly Stark’s. You can find him in the library. Maybe even email one of them and explain that you’re an undergrad and you have some questions about how to relate sociology to your faith (do not be offended if they do not reply — they are busy people). Also, check out some of the books at http://www.heartsandmindsbooks.com/vocation/sociology/

Hope that’s useful to some of you. Much of it applies to the social sciences in general. lamictal orange starter watch barbie mermaidia online making waves divx movie online

Many of you have seen this before, but Hector just forwarded me a link to Are You Living In A Computer Simulation? is a site that argues that at least one of the following is true:

(1) The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature is negligibly small

(2) Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours

(3) You are almost certainly an artifical entity in a computer simulation.

The author leaves off option 4 (or rather, dismisses it in his setup).

(4) It is not possible to run a computer simulation of a mind like ours.

Anyway, it struck me as a Christian that my response is that numbers 1 and 2 (and possibly number 4) are true. The world will end via divine intervention before our civilization is capable of such a feat (and once in heaven we will presumably have no interest in running such simulations even if they prove technologically feasible).

Funny how Christianity affects your reponses to everything–even bizarre academic papers. 🙂

This caught me off-guard (kudos to Christianity Today Blog for finding it): a scientist has done a Bayesian calculation to determine the probability of God’s existence (which he pegs at 67%).

The scientist’s name is Stephen Unwin (read an interview), and the book detailing his thoughts is The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation That Proves the Ultimate Truth

The opening line of his book is “Do you realize that there is some probability that before you complete this sentence, you will be hoofed insensible by a wayward, miniature Mediterranean ass?”

How cool is that?

I’ve not read it yet–so I have no further comments except to say that it looks extremely interesting.

Shaowei’s talk on the relationship between science and religion went really well last night.

Around 55 people showed up in the Okada Tea Room and listened intently as Shaowei laid out his thoughts for them.

Shaowei did a great job, and I saw several people engaged in very serious discussion afterwards (Shaowei got them thinking in a major way).

Woohoo!

Shaowei’s talk was inspired by a paper he wrote for one of his classes and has put on his website: Is There Room For God in Science?

He even has a section of his website devoted to Chi Alpha. Aww…

I just ran across an engrossing article carried by U.S. News and World Report: Divining Nature’s Plan.

It’s about Conway Morris’ new book Life’s Solution : Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, in which the renowned paleontologist evidently suggests that humans were pretty much the inevitable result of an evolutionary process and leaves open the possibility that God could have designed us as we are without needing to specifically create our species.

Wow.

I just ran across a fascinating compiliation of the positive influence of religion (and Christianity in particular) on society: Good Faith.

The author gives extremely specific examples of how faith helps with issues such as substance abuse, marriage, parenting, altruism, sex, crime rates, health, happiness, and freedom.

It’s an impressive list.

So the next time a classmate (or professor) begins talking about all the evils that religion is responsible for, be sure to mention all the good that religion is responsible for as well.

One of the most popular articles on our website is Scientists Who Believe, a listing of influential living scientists who are Christians. Obviously, this is of interest to college students!

That’s why I was so excited when I ran across an article in the British paper The Guardian titled Science Cannot Provide All The Answers.

Here’s an interesting excerpt from the middle of the article: modern science did not emerge 400 years ago to challenge religion, the orthodoxy of the past 2,000 years. Generations of thinkers and experimenters and observers — often themselves churchmen — wanted to explain how God worked his wonders. Modern physics began with a desire to explain the clockwork of God’s creation. Modern geology grew at least partly out of searches for evidence of Noah’s flood. Modern biology owes much to the urge to marvel at the intricacy of Divine providence. 

But the scientists — a word coined only in 1833 — who hoped to find God somehow painted Him out of the picture. By the late 20th century, physicists were confident of the history of the universe back to the first thousandth of a second, and geneticists and biochemists were certain that all living things could be traced back to some last universal common ancestor that lived perhaps 3.5bn years ago. A few things — what actually happened in the Big Bang; how living, replicating things emerged from a muddle of organic compounds — remain riddles. But few now consider these riddles to be incapable of solutions. So although the debate did not start out as science versus religion, that is how many people now see it. 

Paradoxically, this is not how many scientists see it. In the US, according to a survey published in Nature in 1997, four out of 10 scientists believe in God. Just over 45% said they did not believe, and 14.5% described themselves as doubters or agnostics. This ratio of believers to non-believers had not changed in 80 years. Should anybody be surprised?

And a great paragraph from further on: Doubt, expressed most potently 3,000 years ago in the biblical book of Job, is the greatest scientific tool ever invented, he says. To do good science, you have to doubt everything, including your ideas, your experiments and your conclusions. “People like Richard Dawkins characterise religion as doubtless, tub-thumping, blind certainty. But it isn’t like that; he knows it is not like that. There is Job, on his ash-heap, doubting everything, but wondering where the light comes from, and how the hail forms.”

You probably won’t know most of the scientists quoted in the article as they’re all British. It’s still a good read, though. read the full article

The importance of Christianity to the history of Western civilization is being increasingly overlooked, which is why I was so delighted to come across a rather lengthy summary of a new book: For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery by Rodney Stark (Princeton University Press) [see the Amazon page].

Dr. Stark is a solid academic writing within his field, so this book is extremely credible.

Here’s an excerpt from the summary: Stark doesn’t argue so much the virtues of Western civilization as the fact (yes, fact, not theory) that you cannot understand Western civ without reference to Christian theology and the way that it fertilized the soil in which those “extraordinary episodes” grew. The book focuses on four episodes: (1) the efforts at church reform that culminated in the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, (2) the rise of modern science, (3) the fabled witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, and (4) the abolition of slavery and the slave trade.

In each case, Stark shows that a belief in a great God who makes moral demands and who rewards and punishes in the afterlife is an essential component of what happened.

This is information Christians on campus desperately need! Read the whole summary (or read a slightly less charitable review, although if you read that you should also read this unrelated review with the last paragraph of the Post review in mind).