While the French government unveiled its plan to ban the burqa worn by some Muslim women, the reign in Maine leaves much to explain by proposing to allow transgendered people to use the bathroom of their choice. The contrast between the two stories is quite clear: the French move to protect its public while the Mainers move aside to endanger theirs.

Two burqa-wearers walk into a post office …

The stance taken by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, declaring last year that the burqa was not welcome in France, is one taken in the interests of security and as an act against the debasing of women. The burqa (actually, it is techinically the naqib – a head-to-toe covering that leaves no exposed skin bar slits for the eyes) is seen as something that is incongruent with French society. Yet the ban is not intended to marginalize Muslims or to oppress them in any fashion: the ban would see any form (Muslim or otherwise) of veil or other covering of the face in public become illegal, except at specific festivals and cultural events.

France has approximately six million Muslims within its borders, of which less than 2000 Muslim women wear the burqa. That’s a mere 0.03% of the French Muslim population. Ought there really be such a fuss?

Well, to some extent, the French government have recently been given just cause to make such a fuss: a post office was robbed by two burglars just last week. And the burglars were disguised in – yep, you guessed it – burqas.

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[Last updated by Duane: 21 February 2010]

A textbook that actually presents the strengths and weaknesses of evolution.

More info, including pdf samples from the book and a table of contents are available at www.exploreevolution.com

[Update: 21 Feb 2010]

Dr. Carl Wieland writes a relatively positive review of the book in the latest Journal of Creation, saying that there is some really useful and well-presented content that could “…round out many a creationist’s knowledge” and that in most areas “…it is one of the best overviews of the arguments currently available.”

However he also has some expected criticisms. For example, he believes that while ID attempts to limit its sphere of involvement to design vs non-design and make no statements for or against Genesis history, comment on the age of the earth is virtually unavoidable when taking on evolutionary theory and the position of the authors is clearly implied by statements such as “530 Ma ago”, intended to be taken as an established fact.

“…a comprehensive exploration of the arguments for and against today’s evolutionary model of origins is simply not going to be coherent if it was to avoid all comment about the history of the earth. That’s why the authors of Explore Evolution, once they set out to deal with such matters as fossil succession, have little option but to state, implicitly or explicitly, where they stand on such areas as the age of the earth. You either believe that the fossils represent a tape-recording of vast ages, or you don’t. Which is another way of saying that you either believe in the global Flood of Genesis or you reject it.”

I was completely aware of these issues when I bought the book and I would join with Dr. Wieland in wishing the book every success, hoping that it would “…serve to overcome some of the naturalistic prejudice in biology in the minds of its readers”, despite its implicit acceptance of the vast geological ages required for evolution to even get off the ground.

I can state without any sense of reservation that I really admired Carl Sagan as a popularizer of science. I miss him terribly and still cherish his remarkable legacy. The television series Cosmos, which he co-wrote with Ann Druyan, ignited my endless fascination with cosmology and astrophysics. Three of his books—Broca’s Brain, Pale Blue Dot, and Contact—are among the most tattered books on my shelf because I have read them so many times, and the latter still remains one of my favourite science fiction novels. (Even though the 1996 movie was really good, it just could not compare since, for obvious reasons, the book was able to explore nuances and depths that no movie ever could. And the plot device he turned π into? Pure genius!)

But his dictum that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” has come to irritate me something fierce, for no other reason than it ended up getting hijacked by parochial sycophants who are so remarkably irresponsible with it. It is inordinately popular with atheists because it feels in their hands like an impenetrable firewall shielding them against any and all theistic claims, but they wield the dictum horribly oblivious to a crucial handicap: they never bother to define univocal criteria for either what an extraordinary claim is or what extraordinary evidence looks like. The former is usually embellished with synonyms that never amount to a defining criterion, while the latter often gets positioned as anything that will not admit the supernatural. (For example, they usually posit circumstances or phenomena that never preclude possible natural explanations—e.g., God rearranging the stars to spell his name—being fenced in by Clarke’s Third Law on one side and Occam’s Razor on the other, for the evidence is always restricted to the empirical.) But also irritating is the audacious conceit of their demand, as if somehow their own intellectual sanction is a necessary instrument of validation for whatever claim was aired in their presence. “Without sufficient evidence to support your claim,” they usually say, “I am not able to believe it.” That may well be the case but, not to put too fine a point on it, what makes you think your belief is relevant or even required?

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Casting Crowns – Glorious Day (Living He Loved Me)

One day when Heaven was filled with his praises
One day when sin was as black as could be
Jesus came forth to be born of a virgin
Dwelt among men, my example is he
Word became flesh and the light shined among us
His glory revealed

Living, he loved me
Dying, he saved me
Buried, he carried my sins far away
Rising, he justified freely forever
One day he’s coming
Oh glorious day

One day they led him up Calvary’s mountain
One day they nailed him to die on a tree
Suffering anguish, despised and rejected
Bearing our sins, my Redeemer is he
Hands that healed nations, stretched out on a tree
And took the nails for me

Living, he loved me
Dying, he saved me
Buried, he carried my sins far away
Rising, he justified freely forever
One day he’s coming
Oh glorious day

One day the grave could conceal him no longer
One day the stone rolled away from the door
Then he arose, over death he had conquered
Now he’s ascended, my Lord evermore
Death could not hold him, the grave could not keep him
From rising again!

Living, he loved me
Dying, he saved me
Buried, he carried my sins far away
Rising, he justified freely forever
One day he’s coming
Oh glorious day

One day the trumpet will sound for his coming
One day the skies with his glories will shine
Wonderful day my Beloved One bringing
My Savior, Jesus, is mine

Living, he loved me
Dying, he saved me
Buried, he carried my sins far away
Rising, he justified freely forever
One day he’s coming
Oh glorious day

Arthur Pink, Gleanings in the Godhead, Chapter 33.

Few things are so distasteful to the proud human heart as the truth that God does as he pleases, without consulting with the creature; that he dispenses his favours entirely according to his imperial will. Fallen man has no claims upon him, is destitute of any merit, and can do nothing whatever to win God’s esteem. Fallen man is a spiritual pauper, entirely dependent upon divine charity. In bestowing his mercies, God is regulated by nothing but his own good pleasure. “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?” (Matthew 20:15) is his unanswerable challenge. Yet, as the context shows, man wickedly murmurs against this.

This evening I was surprised to find myself being referenced and commented on at a blog I had never heard of before, Anglican Origins Discussion, and by a person who for some reason chose to not engage my argument here at this site. Instead he chose to email the owner of the blog privately (they are friends), who then published a post about the contention in an article titled “Evil and its problems.”

It seems this friend took issue with my argument that assertions of “gratuitous evil” are illicit, by virtue of being assumptions that beg the question against God. “If there exists a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent,” I had said, “then there cannot exist gratuitous evil or suffering, for the two are mutually exclusive in the same way that an Irresistible Force and an Immovable Object are.” Against my view, this friend had written the following in response:

It’s the omni-point and gratuitous evil stuff that is sick. Ryft forgets there is a fall and thus there is gratuitous evil. His convenient enthymematic premiss is that God ordained the fall, an admission which would have atheists rejecting Christianity outright.

There are a couple of problems I have with the statements that he made, things that I find a bit troubling as cutting against the biblical grain.

First of all, notice that he simply asserts that “there is gratuitous evil.” No attempt is made to prove biblically that some evils are gratuitous, nor to counter the argument that I had presented. Again, given the very definitions of the terms involved, it follows necessarily that if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent, then it is logically impossible for any evil to be gratuitous (unjustified, purposeless).

And no, there is no need to posit that God “ordained the Fall,” for even if he had not so ordained things, God is nevertheless omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent. That is, even if we grant that God does not know the free choices of man before they are made (as per Open Theism), he knew that Eve was reaching to partake of the forbidden fruit and had the power to do something about it. (Even the Open Theists will confess that God knows what a person is thinking.) But he did not stop her. He knew what she was doing and could have stopped her, but he let both her and Adam fall. Why? It would be my contention that God had a purpose in it, and there is a large host of scriptures that can be called to support that view. Would this friend disagree, and assert that God did not have a purpose in it (gratuitous)? If so, can he produce any scriptures which show that God is ever purposeless? And can he provide a coherent and sound exegesis of all the scriptures that state otherwise (e.g., 2 Kings 19:25; Isaiah 10:6; cf. Amos 3:6)?

As for the classical and orthodox theology of God being omnipotent and omniscient, he dismisses it with a wave of his hand as being “sick,” which presents itself as a wholly inadequate response. Throughout the centuries of church history, the catholic faith has regarded these attributes as theological orthodoxy across every tradition, from Catholic to Eastern Orthodox to Protestant. In every age theologians have treated the doctrines as a ‘given’, that is, something which is so obvious in the scriptures as to be commonly received. That is, until about the end of the 20th century when the likes of Pinnock, Hasker, Boyd, Sanders, etc., introduced Open Theism. If this friend wishes to deny that God is omniscient and omnipotent, more than just a wave of his hand will be required of him by those who search the scriptures for truths about God.

And finally, atheists already reject Christianity outright. While it is true that pressing upon them the penetrating reach of God’s nature, the implications of his holiness, the lost condition of man in his sinfulness, the exclusive and sovereign jurisdiction of God over all things, man’s inescapable moral culpability to God, etc., will certainly enflame their anger and enmity to God, that is by no means an argument to hold back on such vital truths, ever, which we are commanded to preach unto all the world. As servants of our Lord and Savior, our allegiance is to him—and him alone. We owe to unbelievers nothing but the debt of love—and even that is not for the unbeliever’s sake, but for the sake of Christ and the glory of God. Our faithful commitment is to God in Christ alone, and that covenant relationship we must never allow any man to come between.

As Horatius Bonar put the matter,

For we know that the unrenewed will is set against the Gospel; it is enmity to God and His truth. The more closely and clearly truth is set before it and pressed home upon it, its hatred swells and rises. … It is the Gospel that he hates; the more clearly it is set before him, he hates it the more. It is God that he hates; the more vividly God is set before him, the more does his enmity awaken and augment. … How, then, is this resistance to be over-come, this opposition made to give way? How is the bent of the will to be so altered as to receive that which it rejected? Plainly by his will coming in contact with a Superior one, a will that can remove the resistance … The will itself must undergo a change before it can choose that which it rejected. And what can change it but the finger of God?

Here is a deep thought to chew on: The will is not a cause; it is an effect, whose cause is conation. “Acts of the will cannot come to pass of themselves,” writes Arthur Pink. “To say they can is to postulate an uncaused effect.” John Frame concurs, saying, “The very idea of a ‘will’ which exists in some independence from the person, the intellect, and the emotions, is deeply problematic.” [1]

Choice is a term describing a circumstance appropriate to volition or acts of will, which are determined (causally necessitated) by the mental activity of conation. The term conative (desire) describes one of the three aspects of the human mind, the other two being cognitive (intellect) and affective (emotion); [2] as such, the conative consists of the cognitive and affective and causally produces how one acts on them. Therefore, as Arthur Pink astutely noted: if volition or the will is the effect of these causal faculties, then it is subject to them; if it is subject to them, then it is not sovereign; if it is not sovereign, then we cannot predicate freedom of it.

But freedom should not be predicated of faculties at any rate, but rather of agency. As John Locke wrote, “Liberty is not an idea belonging to volition or preferring, but to the person having the power of doing, or abstaining to do, according as the mind shall choose or direct.” [3] I reference him not as an authority but as having raised a very good point. As the agent is free and not his will, so we should reject ‘free will’ in favour of ‘free agency’.

References:

1. On Arthur Pink: see Chapter 7 of his The Sovereignty of God, under the heading “The nature of the human will.” On John Frame: see his answer to the question on “Agent Causation and Free Will,” as well as the article “Perspectivalism 101” by his friend Joseph Torres.
2. See the article on “Conation” at Wikipedia.
3. “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” which can be found in print in Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources from Hackett Publishing Company, 1998, by Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins, eds.

During a pastoral conference lead by John Piper a few years ago, he was discussing how well John Newton used language to convey a message in his preaching.^[1]

Most of us gravitate to abstractions… we say, ‘Men are foolish to fret so much over material things when they will inherit eternal riches.’

Newton says, ‘Suppose a man was going to New York to take possession of a large estate and his carriage should breakdown one mile before he got to the city, which obliged him to walk the rest of the way to the inheritance. What a fool we should think him if we saw him wringing his hands and blubbering out all the remaining mile, ‘my carraige is broken! my carriage is broken!’.

This was one of several humourous and clever illustrations that Piper used to bring Newton to life. John Newton clearly had a gift with the use of language. In fact Piper believes that this kind of preaching is a matter of life and death in our churches. Maybe so? But I do know that I wish there were more people ministering in our churches who spoke like that!

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Footnotes:

1. John Newton was an 18th Century Clergyman and the writer of the famous hymn Amazing Grace

Last year as part of our Sydney Anglican Church “Connect Groups”^[1] we met to study the doctrinal framework of the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES), whose intention it is to make clear what it means to be a Bible-believing Christian. Although I have previously considered the authority claims of the Bible, this study really made me think more about this issue than I had previously. Phillip Jensen and Tony Payne provide commentary on all nine of the doctrinal statements made by the AFES in the Matthias Media publication The Blueprint^[2]. This article is concerned only with the first of those statements:

The divine inspiration and infallibility of Holy Scripture, as originally given, and its supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct.^[3] [emphasis mine]

Infallibility has to do with the trustworthiness of Scripture. So by implication the AFES seem to be affirming that the Bible is completely reliable when it comes to religious or spiritual issues, but not necessarily when it comes to other issues like science or history. Or as Jensen and Payne put it more explicitly, “… Scripture is limited to matters of faith and conduct. The Scriptures do not claim to be an authority in calculus, nuclear physics, poetry or chess”^[4] [emphasis mine]. For textual support they cite 2 Tim 3:16-17; possibly the most popular proof text used to refute anyone who thinks that the Bible doesn’t make any restrictions on the kinds of subjects on which it speaks truthfully.

But then only two pages later… “The Scripture has authority over all matters on which it speaks. It is not exhaustive – it does not cover all matters – but because of its authorship its authority extends over everything it covers“^[5] [emphasis mine]. What then do Jensen and Payne mean when they talk of Scripture being limited to matters of faith and conduct? To avoid the confusion, I can only assume that what they mean is this:

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