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AR 26:6 - "How much can we actually know?"
In this issue:
APOLOGETICS - "three things that any religion should do"
JUDAISM - enhancing mutual Jewish-Christian understanding?
ORIGINS - how recent scientific discoveries undermine evolution
Apologia Report 26:6 (1,511)
February 11, 2021
APOLOGETICS
"A True Religion Does Three Things and Answers Four Questions: John Stackhouse offers a checklist for sincere spiritual searchers" by Paul Chamberlain (director of the Institute for Christian Apologetics <www.bit.ly/3ciDfE6> at Trinity Western University in British Columbia) -- In his recent book Can I Believe?, Stackhouse <johnstackhouse.com> invites outsiders to consider whether Christian faith is more reasonable and compelling than they might suppose [and] sets out some basic issues that anyone would want to consider....[1] This is a helpful step, one that is often missing in works of apologetics."
According to Stackhouse, there are three things that any religion should do: "First, it should provide a creed that accurately describes the way things are. Second, it should present a code that teaches us how to respond to the way things are. And third, it should offer a community of people who can encourage and instruct as we strive to understand the religion and live out its teachings. ...
"With this framework in mind, Stackhouse turns his attention to Christianity, which he calls 'the most popular and yet perhaps the most unlikely explanation of reality of any of the major ideological options.' He identifies four Christian teachings that qualify as essential." He packages these in the form of questions: 1) "What is real?," 2) "What is best?," 3) "What is wrong?," and 4) "What can be done?" This last step "receives an extended treatment. ...
"The book then examines a number of grounds - historical, philosophical, ethical, pragmatic, aesthetic, psychological, and experiential - for the validity of these essential Christian teachings. Stackhouse takes care to address two of the thorniest obstacles to belief: the exclusivity of the gospel and the problem of a good God allowing evil to exist.
"Along the way, Stackhouse raises what might be the most foundational question of all: When it comes to matters of religion, how much can we actually know?"
The book's "many strengths" include "illustrations, stories, and accounts of the author's personal experience that make it more readable while demonstrating the relevance of its ideas." Christianity Today, Nov '20, pp72-73. <wwww.bit.ly/39haw0D>
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JUDAISM
The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently, by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler [2] -- reviewer George C. Heider (Christian Century, Dec 2 '2) explains that Levine and Brettler "show how multiple traditions arise when different people read the same text. ...
"The authors plainly state their objective: to enlighten both Jews and Christians (but clearly primarily the latter) as to how adherents of the other tradition have both in good faith and within reasonable interpretive boundaries read the same texts in very different ways. ...
"Levine and Brettler deal almost immediately with the problem of nomenclature.... In the end, they settle on 'Old Testament' when discussing Christian appropriation of the collection, 'Tanakh' for Jewish usage, and 'Hebrew Bible' when examining the texts in their original context. The latter comes across as their least bad choice, as no faith community employs a body of writings by this name; it's a term favored by scholars for its supposed neutrality. But it has its own baggage. Indeed, Levine has elsewhere written: 'The so-called 'neutral' term is actually one of Protestant hegemony.' ...
"Although the authors write unapologetically as Jews, I would object strenuously to any attempt to apply a scholarly equivalent of an 'identity politics' critique to this work. [T]hey argue that Christianity is in its essence a belief system, in contrast with Judaism as an ethnicity centered on an ethic. Yet nowhere do they even hint that they would consider 'Christian ethics' to be oxymoronic. ...
"Invariably, they conclude that the historical-critically derived 'original meaning' does not lend itself to its later New Testament (or other Christian) usage, absent both hindsight and an a priori decision that the Old Testament scriptures testify to Jesus (as Jesus himself claims they do in Luke 24:27). At the same time, when they do take up rabbinic usage, the authors note that the rabbis also interpret the text according to their own presuppositions, which often manifested as anti-Christian polemic. ...
"Levine and Brettler also regularly and civilly cite Christian scholars. A rare exhibition of sharp elbows comes in their suggestion that one scholar is not 'doing history' properly in his treatment of Isaiah 7:14 and Matthew 1:23. Their critique seems to suggest that a secular, even positivist approach is required to 'do history' by proper, critical standards. But it is not clear to me from the quotation of this particular scholar that he is intending to do history, critical or otherwise, nor why this must be so in a book devoted to enhancing Jewish-Christian mutual understanding." <www.bit.ly/3sWco6U>
An alternative book title comes to mind: "Eternity with and without Jesus."
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ORIGINS
In "Darwinism: A Teetering House of Cards" Steve Cable of Probe Ministries <probe.org> examines "four areas of recent scientific discovery that undermine evolution" - namely:
1) No materialistic concept for life's origin
2) Little evidence of transitional life forms
3) DNA playing havoc with the basic tenets of Darwinism, and
4) Strong evidence that complex functions could not arise through random changes
For starters, "In 2016, the Royal Society in London convened a meeting <www.bit.ly/3jEhaBy> to discuss 'calls for revision of the standard theory of evolution.'" Regarding the origin of reproducing beings, "Darwin only hoped that life may have originated in a 'warm little pond.' But as one scientist states, 'The origin-of-life field is a failure - we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on earth.'"
In the area of macro-evolution, we're "still searching. Darwin's theory is dependent upon the unobserved concept of macro-evolution, i.e. intergenerational differences accumulating into different species over time. ...
"The number of fossils studied has blossomed over the last 150 years. ... And, in most cases, with no transitional forms between them undermining Darwin's theory."
As "evolution proponent Stephen Gould wrote, 'The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. ... Nature editor Henry Gee put it this way: 'To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story.'"
In House of Cards [3] journalist Tom Bethell points out that "The scientific evidence for evolution is not only weaker than is generally supposed, but as new discoveries have been made..., the reasons for accepting the theory have diminished rather than increased. ... Darwin might well have been dismayed (at) the meager evidence for natural selection, assembled over many years. ... It is worth bearing in mind how feeble this evidence is any time someone tells you that Darwinism is a fact.'"
On the DNA front, in Undeniable [4] biologist Douglas Axe states, "The view that most aspects of living things can be attributed neatly to specific genes has been known ... to be FALSE for a long time." ...
"The facts uncovered about the functioning of DNA and other elements in passing on characteristics to the next generation appear to make more holes in evolutionary theory."
As for the challenge of irreducible complexity, "Darwin wrote his theory would 'absolutely break down' if an organ could not be formed by 'numerous, successive, slight modifications.' ...
"Irreducible complexity means that some known functions require multiple parts that have no purpose without the other parts. For a Darwinian process to create these functions would require useless mutations to be indefinitely maintained until combined with other useless mutations. Michael Behe's analysis has shown the 4 billion years of the earth's existence are not sufficient for such complex functions to be created by random mutations."
As Axe says, "The evolutionary story is ... something much less plausible than hitting an atomic dot on a universe-size sphere over and over in succession by blindly dropping subatomic pins." Cable reports that "Richard Lewontin, a committed materialist, does not believe natural selection can explain complex life forms. He cannot conceive of any gradual set of useful incremental changes resulting in a flying being. Unless a small change gives an advantage, 'the change won't be selected for, and obviously, a little bit of wing doesn't do any good.' ...
"Recent, scientific insights have weakened Darwin's theory. Yet many are unwilling to discuss its weakness. Why this reluctance? It falls into two camps: 1) a commitment to materialism and 2) a desire for academic acceptance." In his book, Zombie Science [5] biologist Jonathan Wells suggests that "Priority is given to proposing and defending materialistic explanations rather than following the evidence wherever it leads. This is materialistic philosophy masquerading as empirical science ... zombie science."
"Atheist Colin Patterson offers an honest view regarding the theory of evolution as 'often unnecessary' in biology. Nevertheless, it was (taught as) 'the unified field theory of biology,' holding the whole subject together. 'Once something has that status it becomes like religion.'"
Cable's conclusion notes Axe's claim that "The religious agenda is the enemy that threatens science. ... Everything that opposes the institutionalized agenda is labeled 'anti-science.'" <www.bit.ly/2NFmjh5>
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Can I Believe? Christianity for the Hesitant, by John G. Stackhouse (Oxford Univ Prs, 2020, hardcover, 224 pages) <www.bit.ly/3caBb1d>
2 - The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently, by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (HarperCollins, 2020, hardcover, 512 pages) <www.bit.ly/3iJYgc6>
3 - House of Cards: A Journalist's Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates, by Tom Bethell (Discovery Inst, 2016, paperback, 294 pages <www.amzn.to/3clK6g2>
4 - Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, by Douglas Axe (HarperOne, Reprint, 2017, paperback, 304 pages <www.amzn.to/3pls4yn>
5 - Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution, by Jonathan Wells (Discovery Inst, 2017, paperback, 238 pages) <www.amzn.to/2M5TTwc>
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