Last night, Ben Stein came to Biola Univeristy to promote his new film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.  In the film, Ben Stein invenstigates the employment termination of several University science professors due to their doubts about Darwinism and support of Intelligent Design.  Find out more about the film here. 

Recently, Dr. R. C. Sproul interviewed Ben Stein about the new film on his radio show, Renewing Your Mind. 

Listen to Part One.

Listen to Part Two. 

A new book has been released attacking Intelligent Design. And by “new” I of course mean chronologically speaking, for its content is apparently the same old rhetoric (which won’t last much longer. As people begin to learn more about this issue, they’ll have give up the whole “ID is just creationism in disguise” bit). Below is a short review of the book from Family Research Council that’s worth a read:

The National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine have mounted yet another attack on the scientific theory of intelligent design, publishing an 89-page book titled Science, Evolution, and Creationism. The new publication falsely equates “intelligent design” (a scientific theory which infers the necessity for intelligent design from scientific evidence) with “creationism” (a term usually used for a theory of origins that begins with the Bible or some other religious text). It also lumps together concepts of microevolution within species (such as the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria), which are not controversial, with the more contested theory of macroevolution, which seeks to trace all existing forms of life to a common ancestor. It appears to dodge altogether the crucial question of how living things could have arisen from non-living things in the first place. It also slanders intelligent design as “unscientific” despite peer-reviewed articles on the concept and the credentials of 700 doctoral-level scientists who have publicly questioned Darwinism. Perhaps the biggest problem with the defenders of Darwinian evolution is that, ironically, they have reversed the roles in the supposed historical “war between science and religion,” by declaring Darwinism to be inerrant dogma, and punishing its doubters by burning them at the academic stake.

I wonder how many philosophers of science contributed to this book? Since the majority consensus in that field is that ID is a legitimate science (whether it’s good science is a different question), my guess is not many.

Stand To Reason, an apologetics organization designed to provide training and resources in the rational and philosophical defense of Christianity, has just started its own channel on YouTube. They have uploaded many videos on subjects such as the relationship between faith and reason, the meaning of tolerance, and the problem of evil. The videos are short, ranging from 30 seconds to 4 minutes, each answering a specific question about Christianity and culture. These are great resources and I encourage you to check them out, and also to poke around STR’s website:

STR on YouTube

STR’s website

Here are two sample videos; The first is Greg Koukl answering the question, “Did God create evil?”

The second is Greg answering the question, “If God is all-powerful, why is there evil?”

I love this time of year. The wearying heat of Summer will soon give way to the crisp, cool air of Fall. Because this is Southern California, I can’t hope for real whether, but I can certainly pray for a bit of rain here and there.Most important of all, school is back in. I have always loved the return to school. But, oddly enough, not because of school. I usually looked forward to going back to school because it meant seeing old friends or gaining some other pleasure that had absolutely nothing to do with the day-to-day of receiving my education. And so, because I did not love school for its own sake, it wouldn’t take long for me to grow tired of getting up early every morning and having to slave away at homework every night (a task that, because I loathed it so much, was rarely ever completed on time).

This rather rapid decent into academic apathy has been the case as recently as my Sophomore year of College. I have found in the last year or so, however, that this sentiment has completely reversed. After completing my first year (two semesters) at Biola University, I find myself genuinely excited about the prospect of school itself. Attending classes, listening to lectures, discussing new ideas with my peers, and, yes, reading lots of long-and-often-hard-to-follow philosophy books! Every thought leaves me feeling an eager anticipation for tomorrow (unless of course tomorrow happens to be a Friday or Saturday…can you believe that??!! I actually dread the weekends!!).

Whatever else education may be, it is most certainly the impartation of truth. Whether learning about the fundamental principles of Chemistry and Physics, or about the rules of Logic, or about the events of History, education is about knowledge and truth. But this realization must be cautioned against. For in one of the more curious ironies of fallen man, it seems almost universally the case that knowledge walks hand-in-hand with hubris. In a strange sort of way, truth becomes the antithesis of love. After all, if I possess knowledge that my friend from high school does not, am I not in some way just a little bit better than he is? After a moment’s reflection, I’m willing to bet you’d find that this thought hits a little closer to home than you’d like it to.

Can you think of a time when you were talking with someone about politics, history, or religion? These topics are unique from many others in that they are simultaneously objects of intensive study at the graduate and post-graduate levels of academia, and yet they are just as vulgar, topics that every human being must deal with on a daily basis. Because of this, it will often be the case that a simple person will make some simple statement like, “This country has been such-and-such since the days of the civil war.” The person may not mean anything serious by this simple comment, but his slightly-more-educated-in-history/philosophy friend will immediately feel a kind of disdain for the “shallow” picture of history that this person has. And, being the good friend that he is, he will take it upon himself to beat this poor person over the head with his own ignorance of the world. Now, it is all well and good to lovingly correct someone you know who has a mistaken view about something (in a country full of public-school educated people who get 85% of their outlook on life from the media, you’re bound to know quite a few people with mistaken views), but that’s not what I’m cautioning against. The caution is simply not to think yourself so much better that your uneducated friend. If knowledge is power, as the saying goes, it is quite easy for knowledge to kindle a powerful pride, a vicious vanity in those who have it. And these feelings will inevitably lead them to an almost bitter loathing of those who don’t.

Here we encounter another irony. On the one hand, the Christian should not face this dilemma. After all, a child-like faith in the simple truths of the Gospel lead to salvation. For the Christian, you don’t need a PhD to understand the fundamental truths of the universe. In fact, it is the Christian’s humble admission of his own finitude that recognizes that even someone with a PhD in philosophy or physics probably doesn’t really understand the universe half as well as he thinks he does. Compare this to the secular world. By and large, the secular man believes himself to know everything. Darwin got everything right when he naturalistically explained the origin of all things, Nietzsche and Freud got everything right when they explained away morality and religion, and Marx got everything right when he explained the deterministic economic forces the have shaped all of human history and when he outlined how mankind could reach its Utopian future. The secular man sits on his pedestal, the center of his own universe, and scoffs at every generation that has come before him, along with all their quaint traditions. With such an attitude it’s easy to see why secular academics have no love for their uneducated brethren.

On the other hand, this danger is just as potent for the Christian. Because the truths of Scripture are so important, so sacred, and so valuable we are tempted to think much of ourselves when we have studied them in great depth. One can even call to mind stories of impetuous young seminary students who return to their home church for the first time after being away and start picking fights with their pastor…in front of the congregation! Or we could imagine the conversations this young seminary student might have with his atheist friends. I don’t know about you, but I find it disturbingly easy to imagine an entirely one-sided conversation in which the young man repeatedly beats his friends over the head with cosmological arguments and moral arguments and the mounting evidence for intelligence design, all the while thinking quite a lot of himself for having defended the integrity of God to these blasphemers. Needless to say, his atheist friends are none too keen to pay attention to his arguments after a while, and his hubris has now cost him any chance of being a good witness by his character.

And that last part is the most troublesome of all. Christianity’s greatest apologetic has never been intellectual arguments for the existence of God, but the “living arguments” of loving, gracious Christian people. In the grand scheme of history, winning hearts and minds to Christ has never depended on Anselm’s Ontological Argument half as much as it has depended on offering a loving embrace or a helpful hand to those whom the “elites” of the culture have shunned. That is true today as much as it ever has been. As the intellectual elites at the secular universities grow ever more in their disdain for the common man, Christians must work hard to marry their knowledge with the love that we have in Christ, and give that love to those common folk who need it most.

But one final caution. None of the thoughts I’m expressing here are original, and there have been Christians who have responded to this problem by abandoning the pursuit of knowledge and clinging to an emotional, subjective “faith.” This is no better an answer. Love without truth to guide it is just as bad as truth without love to humble it. And while the majority of the common folk may need love more than sophisticated arguments, there can be no denying that it is the intellectual elites who are running this country, and they most certainly need strong, rational, persuasive arguments from Christians if we have any hope of winning back our culture and saving the West from the brink of destruction.

With all these things in mind, may God grant us the wisdom to temper our growing knowledge with Christian charity, as we continue to be a light in this dark world.

In the face of opposition, at what point does it become irrational to hold to a certain belief? And should you decide that the rational thing to do is to abandon that belief, does that necessitate abandoning your entire worldview?

Dr. John Mark Reynolds discusses these and other important intellectual questions over at Scriptorium Daily:

Every view of reality of which I am aware has problems. Most have both external problems (things that don’t match what is predicted outside the theory) and internal problems. Atheism has problems, naturalism has problems, and so does traditional Christianity. One ends up picking the problems one prefers! Of course this must be done carefully and rationally, but there is no good in pretending that the day is coming when every problem will go away.

What would be the fun in that?

When you meet someone, whether a Darwinist, a Platonist, or a Christian, who has no doubts or intellectual puzzles and nothing but contempt for the strengths of other world views . . . that person is no friend of a free and enlightened human.

Read the full article>>

Dr. Paul Spears over at Middlebrow has an interesting article on education. Most surprising is the connection between Will Smith and Plato, seemingly strange bedfellows.

“Smith describes his academic experience in high school in rather negative terms. He states, “Things that have been most valuable to me I did not learn in school.” He is describing his high school experience which consisted mainly of memorizing facts and figures so you could pass a test. He stated, “[T]he date of the Boston Tea Party does not matter.” He believes that students should be evaluated on their comprehension of the material and how they can apply it to life. Because of his position on education his children are “home-schooled”. Not that he teaches them. He can afford to bring tutors in to teach his children.

Not only does he have them tutored in the basics—he has his elementary aged kids reading Plato and Aristotle. Smith realizes how important the ideas of Plato and Aristotle are in understanding our society. He states that you cannot be an American without reading Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics.” Read the full article here.

Mark Krause over at The Right House has posted an article regarding the Church’s failure when it comes to teaching our youth about sex and effectively equipping them to comabt sexual temptation. It seems this is a fairly hot issue, since it’s been getting a lot of attention lately (naturally, Mr. Krause’s post is much better than mine).

“Let’s not teach our kids to fear sex. Let’s teach them sex in a Biblical manner. Let’s teach them that not all touch is sexual. Don’t try to bully them into purity, rather, give them loving Biblical guidance as to the commands given to us by God, and the reasons for those commands. I can’t even remember any good philosophical reasons given for why we are not to have sex before marriage in my youth group. They just said that God says so. While this is true, and I’m not advocating that we demand philosophical answers from God for everything He says, if we have answers that will help kids understand and better live out the commandment, why don’t we give them these answers?”

Read the full article here.