When John MacArthur visited a philosophy class

In this clip John MacArthur starts off sounding quite arrogant – he says he sees everything clearly. but he isn’t boasting about himself and his intellect. He’s boasting about what he – and what we – have been given. And Christians should not be humble about the greatness of our God!

“As a Christian, you and I share this in common: I see things clearly. I see the world clearly. In fact, I often wonder why I’m not on more programs giving the right answer to everything. It’s all very clear to me. Everything is clear to me. I understand where the world came from, where it’s going. I understand all of that. I understand why things happen the way they happen. I understand life and death and life after death and heaven and hell and morality and immorality. I understand it all. I understand why the world is the way it is. Why people act the way they act. Am I particularly intelligent? No. Am I particularly wise? No. I just have the mind of Christ here in this book.”

4  reasons Christians should study evolution (10 minute read)

“As a science teacher in Christian schools, I’ve noticed a predictable progression when students begin studying evolution. They start with a mocking attitude that “evolution is stupid.” But when I present the details accurately, a bewildered hush falls over the class. Quizzical looks are followed by raised hands and vociferous objections. They sound betrayed.

“Finally, as they discover biblical answers from the creation perspective, light bulbs turn on, and their perplexity is replaced with relief. They then are able to communicate their thoughts about origins more coherently and confidently.

“We fall short if we tell Christian youth that the study of origins doesn’t matter or that it’s a side issue. We underestimate evolution’s threat to their faith…”

What gives something value?

As Christians we generally have a negative view of subjectivity – morality certainly isn’t subjective. But whether chocolate or vanilla ice cream is best certainly is.

Marx thought that a product’s value came from the workers and how much effort was putting into building something. That makes some intuitive sense, because things that take a lot of man-hours to build – like a house – are more expensive than things that take very little human labor, like, say, a candy bar. But products can take a lot of man-hours to produce and still have no value at all – think Google Glass, or that phone Amazon tried to market years back. These are products that had hundreds and maybe thousands of people involved in making them, but no one wanted them. Despite the many man-hours, they weren’t worth a dime.

So what makes something valuable is dependent on what people think about it. Bitcoin is an example, valuable because people say it is. And diamonds too.

This is important because it highlights how markets – the free exchange of goods – help us figure out what people will value. And government interference with markets makes it much harder to know what people value. By way of example, a story is told of how the Soviet Union, for efficiency’s sake produced right boots in one factory and left boots in another. But then, one day the right boot factory burnt down, forcing the left boot factory to offer pairs of two left boots. And you know what? Demand didn’t drop. Because if your choice in a wintery climate is no boots at all, or two left boots, you’ll go with two left boots. So, from the Soviet government’s perspective, they’d have no feedback telling them that people actually hate their product. “Sales” would seem to show that it is still popular indeed.

The documentary hypothesis – an attack on the books of Moses dismantled

A friend who went to Calvin Seminary was taught there that the books of Moses might not be by Moses, and were instead by 4 others – this was known as the documentary hypothesis or the JEDP theory (each initial standing for one of those four “editors”). I don’t know that this registered with him as an attack on the Bible – it might have seemed just trivia at the time. But those behind the theory didn’t see the Bible as God’s Word. They saw it as a work of men, revised, edited, corrected and reworked. Some years later that friend now doubts what the Bible says about homosexuality and I wonder if his slip into liberalism is connected with what he swallowed about Moses so many years ago – after all, if he believed the Bible was edited then, why couldn’t he edit out the parts he doesn’t like now?

But the JEDP theory was always wrong, and has become all the more clearly so now. This isn’t an article for everyone, but it caught my eye because of my friend, and because this is from the folks behind “The Patterns of Evidence” film series, and relates specifically to their documentary The Moses Controversy. 

Math from a Christian worldview?

What if the Bible was right about sex?

Christians, we need to be bold about the truth God has entrusted to us in His Word. When it comes to sex, as this video shows, it can be as simple as pitching the fruit of the Bible’s sexual ethic vs. the fruit of the sexual revolution.