It's all over the news: same-sex marriage laws are being passed in several states. It occurred to me: where did this term "same-sex" come from? How did it become so prevalent? And where did the word "homosexual" go? Did I blink or something?
A fraternity brother of mine on Facebook linked to an article about how Maine legalized same-sex marriage, his home state. His comment was neutral, so I made a neutral (but thoughtful) remark: "When did we stop calling it 'homosexual' and start calling it 'same-sex'? They both mean the same thing." One of his friends immediately responded:
Technically, yes, but words pick up negative connotations over time, so people have to come up with new terms that don't carry the negative connotations. E.g. Negroes -> Colored People -> African Americans -> Black. Homosexual Marriage probably wouldn't sell as well.
I don't know if he realizes it, but the last sentence reveals so much about what's going on in America today.
"...wouldn't sell as well."
If you don't call it sin, does it cease to be sin?
The past month I have run across an extremely powerful argument for the Christian God's existence and I want to share it with you all in an easy and accessible manner.
It is called the Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God, or TAG for short. It is also filed under Presuppositional Apologetics, but these big words don't really matter. What matters is the meat of the argument:
Logic, science, and morality make no sense except in the light of the Christian worldview. Stated differently, only Christianity offers a rational, non-arbitrary basis for logic, science, and morality. What this means is that before the skeptic can even present his logical arguments against Christianity, he must first justify his use of logic, because the Christian using TAG is saying that by the skeptic using logic, he is assuming the truth of Christianity, which makes utter nonsense of all his arguments against this truth!
That is a taste of the power of the argument. Here is a bit on how the argument works:
Logic:
Why should the materialist believe the laws of logic? They are not material, therefore they do not exist, according to his worldview. He might respond that they simply work, but that does not answer the question. The existence of immaterial laws of any kind refute his worldview that matter in motion is all there is. He could say that laws of logic exist as abstractions in the mind, but again, this is nonsensical in the worldview that asserts that there is no such thing as abstractions or minds.
On the contrary, laws of logic like the Law of Noncontradiction (Canada cannot be both north of the United States and not north of the United States) flow from the very nature of the Christian God. The Bible states that the all-powerful God cannot deny Himself (2 Tim 2:13) and cannot lie (Num 23:19, Heb 6:18). Further, Jesus, His Son, is described as the Logic of God (John 1:1, "Word" = logos, mind, reason, logic). Christianity provides a very firm foundation for trusting the Laws of Logic, for God is a logical God.
Science:
Why should the atheist trust the basic assumptions of science, such as the Law of Uniformity, which states that an experiment performed today will behave identically tomorrow (given the same starting conditions). Why cosmos instead of chaos? If the atheist says that things have always behaved this way and there is great statistical chance that it will behave this way tomorrow, he is begging the very question asked, which is illogical!
On the contrary, the Bible states that God sovereignly upholds His creation in an orderly fashion. There exist laws of science because God has placed them there when He created the universe.
Morality:
On what basis can an atheist declare something is right or wrong? Is it morally wrong that a lion kills an antelope? According to atheists, we are just animals, a blip in the universe that is here now but soon will not be. Yes, atheists can be moral; good atheists do exist. But they borrow from the Christian worldview when they do so, meaning their own worldview is inconsistent.
On the contrary, the Christian worldview offers a robust foundation for morality. God is good and sovereign. Morality flows from His very nature.
Summary:
A good analogy for this argument is like a guy who denies the existence of air: "I don't believe air exists!" You can reply back, "Well, you had to use air to tell me that." Just as speaking words across a room requires air, communication and arguments require logic. Which brings me to the title of this blog: if you can read this sentence, God exists.
Resources and Background:
TAG is a newcomer to arguments for the existence of God. It began with Cornelius Van Til in the 1970s and 1980s. He presented the argument, but died before he could flesh it out. This task was left to his followers. Greg Bahnsen developed the argument further in the 1980s and 1990s before he too died. John Frame also contributed.
TAG was used by Bahnsen in the historic 1985 debate with Gordon Stein (atheist), which you can listen to here and read along with this transcript (PDF, HTML). (Warning, the YouTube playlist is out of order near the end.) Eleven years later, Gordon Stein admitted that he was unprepared for this new argument. He claimed to have developed a rebuttal but as of 2009 I am unable to find it. Stein died in 1996.
Michael Martin (atheist) took the task of dismantling TAG seriously. In 1996 he presented TANG, which is supposed to show TAG to be false. What shocked me was that I was able to show two of his three main points to be false in the first reading! Michael Martin is supposed to be a world-class atheist! How am I able to take him on myself?! John Frame and Michael Butler responded and confirmed what I had already caught, while dismantling the third point I wasn't able to.
Internet Infidels page on TAG. Note that this is 2009 and their latest document is from 2001. Also note after reading them that atheists have yet to dismantle TAG. My sense is that they even knew this when writing those documents; they don't sound confident.
My takeaway point from this is that TAG is extremely powerful and it still has a choke-hold on atheists. I suggest Christians learn the basic points of this argument.
3:15 Always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence;
In this blog I pretty much focused on atheists. I did this out of simplicity. TAG is very distinctly a Christian argument, not a generic theistic argument. Also, in order for this argument to work, it must be contrasted with another worldview/religion, as you saw above. I did not show how TAG stands up against other worldviews/religions, but this is possible. It comes down to whether any worldview or religion has built within itself any explanation for these three items: logic, science, morality. If a worldview or religion is internally or systemically contradictory, they can be eliminated outright, for how can a worldview or religion account for logic when it violates logic?
I invite the curious to study this topic further. I am not a professor and I feel I can only give an overview without introducing falsehoods on this topic.
Hard to believe, but it's true. I was doing my taxes with one of those online dealies that show how much you owe the government in the corner each time you click Next. When I entered in my charitable givings to my local congregation (my tithe), the number changed from a negative refund (I owe) to a positive one! Doing a little experimentation by temporarilly setting my tithe to $0 (you can do this with software), I jotted down this other number and did the math: I figure I'm getting 15.4% back of what I gave to my church!
To use a simple example, if I give $1000 to my church, the government will give me $154 back!
Granted, this might be specific to me alone. Because of my tithe, I qualified for an itemized deduction over the standard deduction. The tax code can be pretty complicated; maybe I'm in a different pre-midlife crisis category or something.
But still: that's quite a lot! And you know what that means? That's that much more I can give to my church or some other charity! Thanks, Uncle Sam!
And all thanks and glory to God! I'm continually amazed at how when I give my money freely away, more seems to come out of nowhere to meet my daily needs! His hands are soft and warm; it's nice being held up in them :)
My blog this week is about television, but perhaps not in the way you've heard it before. Endulge me with by letting me ease into this subject with a little context about what's going on in my life. Or, if not, skip to the paragraph below the "Truth Decay" image.
One of my small groups is reading through Don't Waste Your Life by John Piper. It discusses what it means to live a meaningful life, a life not wasted. He presents a very strong argument that the only way a life isn't wasted is if it is in complete service to God. It's an extremely convicting book. I highly recommend it. Click the image on the right to purchase, or visit www.dontwasteyourlife.com to read the whole book for free in PDF format. Or stop by my house; I have an extra copy for you to borrow.
Chapter 7, titled "Living to Prove He Is More Precious than Life," brings up the subject of television:
Oh, how many lives are wasted by people who believe that the Christian life means simply avoiding badness and providing for the family. So there is no adultery, no stealing, no killing, no embezzlement, no fraud—just lots of hard work during the day, and lots of TV and PG-13 videos in the evening (during quality family time), and lots of fun stuff on the weekend—woven around church (mostly). This is life for millions of people. Wasted life. We were created for more, far more. . . . No one will ever want to say to the Lord of the universe five minutes after death, I spent every night playing games and watching clean TV with my family because I loved them so much. I think the Lord will say, “That did not make me look like a treasure in your town. You should have done something besides provide for yourself and your family. And TV, as you should have known, was not a good way to nurture your family or your own soul.”
This is what my childhood looked like. Piper goes on from here into a digression of what television actually is. He quotes from Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which sounded familiar to me. Sure enough, the book I read a few years ago, Truth Decay, by Douglas Groothius, whom Piper also quoted in this chapter, also quotes from Neil Postman's book in the appendix. I'd like to give a summary of this appendix, because, years later, what I learned in it is still with me and continues to shape my life.
“Television: Agent of Truth Decay”
In the 14-page appendix titled "Television: Agent of Truth Decay," Groothius writes that "television is an unreality appliance that dominates our mentality. We then take this unreality mentality and impose it on the rest of the real world. That is, we (mis)understand the world in terms of the mentality inherent to the form of communication that is television."
Groothius goes on to say that though many have objected to TV's content, few have critiqued its medium. The medium shapes the message, and mediated messages shape us. He lists four points about the medium: One, it emphasizes movement over written and spoken language. "However, when the image dominates the word, rational discourse ebbs. We are attracted to the incandescent screen just as medievals were attracted to stain glass windows." Thinking requires that we remove ourselves a bit from the action, but TV prevents this from happening since the moving images are all action. Thinking, writing and communicating in a linear and logical fashion is undermined. Language, grammar and rhetoric are "fractured." Propositions and beliefs can be true or false, but images do not have any truth value. He quotes Malcom Muggeridge who said, "The one thing television can't do is express ideas." Another good quote from Francis Shaeffer that's stuck with me through the years:
TV manipulates viewers by its normal way of operating. Many viewers seem to assume that when they have seen something on TV, they have seen it with their own eyes. . . .
But this is not so, for one must never forget that every television minute has been edited. The viewer does not see the event. He see . . . an edited symbol or an edited image of that event. An aura and illusion of objectivity and truth is built up, which could not be totally the case even if the people shooting the film were completely neutral. ["Television: The Cyclops That Eats Books", emphasis in original.]
As a consequence, we loose the ability to think rationally, to be able to support our beliefs with evidence and reason. Groothius encourages Christians to "restore the primacy and power of the Word as an antidote to truth decay by television."
As a consequence, we loose the ability to think rationally, to be able to support our beliefs with evidence and reason.
Second, TV displaces authentic selfhood. We take on or mimic the (shadows of) characters we see in TV. Whereas, with reading, we adjust our sensibilities and attitudes to whom we have read. Reading allows us to engage in "grand narratives and abstract truths." Contemplating the holiness of God, for instance. Reading allows us to be active in our journey. TV sweeps us along at its own pace. "One cannot muse over a television program the way one ponders a character in Shakespere or in C.S. Lewis, or a Pascal parable...." With this loss of self in TV, the self "is destabilized, uprooted and hollowed out; it becomes ungrounded, weightless, truthless, opaque to itself -- and it likes it this way, because no alternative is available (on television)."
Third, TV, by the nature of its medium, fragments continuity. It gives no rational context for the images that pop in and out. A sober news story of a massacre in Gaza will be followed by a peppy advert for Disneyworld, followed by a persuasive talk to buy a certain brand of toilet paper. Postman calls this a "peek-a-boo world," a world lacking coherence, consisting of ever-shifting, artificially linked images. Without context, contradictions cannot be detected. Without context, meaning is lost. In postmodernism, the only meaning is what you put into it.
Fourth, the rapid rate of images in TV makes careful evaluation impossible. The average duration between cuts has decreased by half in the last three decades, to just three or four seconds, with advertisements much faster. "The human mind was not designed by its Creator to accommodate to these visual speeds, and so the sensorium suffers from the pathologies of velocity." Our mind can't analyze images this fast, so the mind just absorbs it. The images bypass the reasoning part of the mind. As a church elder told me last month, "once an image is in [the mind], it's stuck there forever; you can't get it out." Getting used to such speeds tends to make people intellectually impatient and easily bored with anything that is slow moving and undramatic. The pace of TV "disallows edification, understanding, and reflection." Compare this to Ps 46:10.
Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.
Megachurches are influenced by the TV culture: they think they must be entertaining to report truth. "One pastor of a megachurch advises preaches that sermons should be roughly twenty minutes in length and must be 'light and informal,' with liberal sprinklings of 'humor and anecdotes.' " A few years after reading Truth Decay, I read Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace, by James M. Boyce, published postmortem, who echoed the same sentiments.
Practical Tips to Quitting TV
If you can't go “cold-turkey,” then create TV-free zones and times.
Groothius gives a few practical tips to become un-televised. One, "engage in a TV-free fast for at least one week and note the changes produced in your thoughts and attitudes. Discuss these changes with those closest to you or record them in a journal." He gives this challenge to his students. They almost all report an incredible attachment to TV they didn't know they had. I found this out, too. They (as I) suffered from withdrawal symptoms at first, but later experience a calming effect, were more contemplative, and found more time for family and friends and reading. "When they went back to watching television, many were shocked to realize what they had not seen when they were habituated and desensitized to this medium: most television programming is insipid, illicit and idiotic."
Two, if you can't go "cold-turkey," then create TV-free zones and times. For me, I was accustomed to getting dinner and plopping on the couch in front of the tube. Change it up. Eat in the kitchen instead. (Remove the TV from the kitchen if you have one there.) Instead of the TV being the focus of the living room, rearrange the furniture so it is not. Hide the TV with a rug or cabinet. This breaks the TV-reflex and gives you a chance to choose something better.
Three, replace TV with truth-enhancing activities, such as reading thoughtful books. Reading (and truth) is an antedote to the effects of TV. "The very act of reading demands a deep level of intellectual engagement and bestows tremendous pleasure and benefit for the faithful." He quotes Postman at length to drive this last sentence home. Reading is active, watching is passive. He encourages us to read the Bible. I would add "daily:" join my read-the-Bible-in-a-year group! :)
My Thoughts
That's a quick summary of the 14-page appendix. Thought I'd share. This appendix more than anything else in the book has stuck with me for several years. This Lent I will be TV-free for 3 years. The first two weeks were so hard (near to the point of having shakes, I'm serious, it was that hard!), but I am so glad I did it!! Note, if there's a TV on in the room, I may watch it to be "social," but if the primary watcher leaves the room and it's just me, I turn the TV off. I don't close my eyes to TV in bars and restaurants. I'm not "weird" about it. And I'll watch TV for certain special things, like the Inauguration. One thing I miss is the things TV can bring that written news articles can't, like the airplane crash in NY two weeks ago; I still haven't seen any motion media of this, only written accounts. But Groothius is right: I can't watch TV now. Everybody is going nuts over House, CSI, and those house-flipping shows. They're so...meaningless (Ecclesiastes comes glaringly to mind). Sitcoms: people wait their turn to say their line, to deliver as many humorless punchlines as they can each minute, as if it's a race. The personalities are as fake as the laughtrack. The topics are shallow, rehashed grist I watched when I was a kit growing up on Three's Company. Nothing is new under the phosphor. And no wonder, if I've grown accustomed to the awesomeness of this: VIDEO-DEBATE--Christian-versus-Agnostic--Does-God-Exist
After quitting TV, I found I had a tremendous amount of time. I say I watched 2-3 hours a night regularly. Almost three years later I'm again complaining I have no spare time. Reflecting more, I see I'm writing more emails and Internet posts, interacting with more people, and reading (and listening to) more theology. All of these things are now "crucial" and I find it difficult to part with these activities (thus my complaints about not having any time :P ) But I'd rather have it this way than loose my brain to the idiot box, the boob tube.
Thanks for reading! Below is your reward: a video from the Superbowl, which is apropos to this blog:
There's a new humanist ad campaign hitting town: "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake." AP reports: "God humbug: Humanist holiday ads say just be good" The ads will be running on DC busses next week.
If you're not familiar with humanism, you should be. It's the dominant philosophy of America these days. Don't confuse it for humanitarianism, which is someone who helps another human out. Humanists, well-stated by Wikipedia, "affirm the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appealing to universal human qualities, particularly rationality." It's essentially Christian values divorced from God.
In America, it grew from the nihilistic philosophies of Nietche. According to nihilists, without God, there is no purpose, no reason for doing anything, no good, no bad. We came from nothing, and will return to nothing. The universe began in an explosion and will die a slow and cold death. Whatever you do, it doesn't matter. It's a naturally depressive view.
Humanists put a positive spin on this: help other humans out. But if you came from nothing and will return to nothing, the glaring question is: why? Who defines "good" and "bad?" Without an objective Lawgiver, one man's "good" is another man's "evil." The ad should say "Why believe in a god? Just do whatever you want." A critic in the article said it rightly: "How do we define 'good' if we don't believe in God? God in his word, the Bible, tells us what's good and bad and right and wrong. If we are each ourselves defining what's good, it's going to be a crazy world." Divorcing God from these "good" morals has led some philosophers to say humanists have "both feet firmly planted in mid-air." It's a bit startling, then, to read this:
"Edwords said the purpose isn't to argue that God doesn't exist or change minds about a deity, although "we are are trying to plant a seed of rational thought and critical thinking and questioning in people's minds." "
Last month, the British Humanist Association announced a similar campaign on London buses with the message: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." But the same question remains: why?
Christians: Be on alert. Don't forget your Duty. Meet irrationality with the rational message of the Gospel. For those seeking to resolve the paradox above, here's the answer:
1:21 for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened.
Follow this blog
