Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Apologetics

So often I have heard it said that apologetics can't do a whole lot for people and that only the gospel can turn a heart.

When I say "but I find this and that really helpful and I find it quite convincing", then they say that is only so because I believe already.

That could be.

What changes a mind?

I don't find that I am really so much in the business of trying to change a mind, but to learn and to bolster and to analyze.  You may take from it what you will and what you like.  You have a mind and a heart.

So, why "apologetics"?

I don't know. -- It does help me.

When I listen to Swineburn, or read David Berlinksy, as I did recently, or contemplate the complexity of a single cell, and the impossibility of getting organic life from rocks without a miracle, it does help me believe.  I find it profound.  If I find it profound, would I not think that there are others who find it profound?  Am I not supposed to talk about it?

And then there is all this opposition.  Don't talk about this.  Don't talk about that.  Keep it in the church, don't bother me with it. And so on.  It makes one think.  It makes one think that it is convincing other people, too, but they just don't want to admit it.  Otherwise, they would refute it.  But they don't.  They just throw rocks or walk away.

Richard Dawkins proposed that life might have been seeded on earth by aliens.  Now there is something that does not convince.  Creation has to be excluded from all discussion because it is not "scientific".  Science will find the answer, it is always asserted.  There is a faith. -- Science will find an answer how we got life from inorganic material?  Science will find the answer how we got the big bang from Nothing?  Science will find an answer to the question of the incredible complexity of living things and the fine tuning of the universe?  Physics will make sense of the incomprehensible revelations it is finding out about and can't really compute?  We will get answers that will make sense to us?  Even if we find answers to some of these questions, will we know how mind, consciousness, sensory perception, love, emotion, justice, and such essential intangibles come to be?



No comments: