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).