Recently in Apologetics Category

The Evangelical Outpost has posted a list of 100 Christian Blogs that he has "found to be the most convicting, enlightening, frustrating, illuminating, maddening, stimulating, right-on and/or wrongheaded by Christians expressing a Christian worldview."

I have to ask, who has the time to be influenced by that many blogs?

I'm a scientist; I believe in God.

I encourage you to read the brief commentary by Dr. Francis Collins linked above. He's the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, and former atheist. I nearly included his book on my list for 2007, but went with John Polkinghorne's book instead.

As a scientist, academician, and Christian, I'm always interested to read about other believing scientists and philosophers. Especially those that speak openly about their faith. It's far more common to see this boldness with senior scientists (hence the title of this entry) because faith is shunned so much in the sciences, and especially in my field of Psychology.

Let me just say how refreshing to read his statement about Evolution:
Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.

It's time for evangelicals to embrace evolution and common decent much like the Catholic Church (eventually) adopted Copernicus's heliocentric model of the solar system. As Collins says, "I find no conflict here." However, it is not my intent to delve deeply into the Evolution-Creation debate with this post. That'll have to wait for another day.

I'll be attending what looks to be a great apologetics conference next weekend. The 2006 Apologetics Conference at McLean Bible Church here in Northern Virginia boasts a great line-up of speakers--all presenting in person. Thinkers such as JP Moreland, NT Wright, William Lane Craig, Craig Blomberg, and Michael Murray will be there, as well as many others. It looks like there is a overall session each day followed by individual topic workshops. The workshop topics are the same each day with different speakers presenting each time. The topics are Creation and Intelligent Design (Michael Behe will be speaking), New Testament Reliability--Focus on Gospels, World Religions and New Movements, Contemporary Barriers to Faith, and a Student Track. For reasons that I'll explain at a later date, I'll be avoiding the Creation/ID workshops. In fact, I'll probably stick to the Contemporary Barriers to Faith because I like the speaker line-up: Michael Murray (philosopher)on belief in God and the brain, Doug Geivett on pluralism, NT Wright on evil and the justice of God, and David Horner on moral apologetics. The organizers recently added a screening of Lee Strobel's forthcoming film "Case for a Creater" based on his book of the same title.

I'm sure I'll have plenty of thoughts to post after the conference.

What would it take for you to be convinced that Floyd Landis is not guilty of using performance enhancing drugs (or other cheating techniques)? Would you have been convinced if the sample B test had come out normal? What about now that his sample B confirmed the results from sample A? This current controversy brings up an important consideration when talking about matters of science and faith (or anything, really). What is your standard of evidence for believing or disbelieving something, or even abandoning belief?

Naturally, we have different standards for different beliefs. Sometimes it doesn't take much, and other times a mound of evidence may be required. For example, it would require a tremendous volume of evidence for my friend Jeff to believe that Barry Bonds didn't cheat. Meanwhile, it doesn't take much to believe that someone is a cheater. How many times do you need to observe someone cheat to know he or she is a cheater? Once.

The above examples are behavioral, but consider deeper belief systems that people hold. I have to ask myself, what would it take for me to abandon my Christian faith? Is there anything that could do it? Such a standard of evidence tends to be exceptionally high for people of dedicated religious conviction, be it Christian or otherwise. Likewise, the standard can be equally high, if not higher, for non-believers to be convinced.

For example, naturalists typically have an exceptionally high standard of evidence for accepting non-natural explanations of phenomena. I suspect that even directly witnessing a miraculous or supernatural event would leave the dedicated naturalist in search of a natural explanation, unwilling to accept a supernatural one. As scientists like to say, exceptional claims require exceptional evidence. (By the way, this heuristic generally applies in science across the board, and rightfully so.)

In terms of the intersection between science and faith, standards of evidence become critical when discussing the evolution/creation/ID debate, miracles, the resurrection, etc. I wrote about this issue to set the stage for later posts. In the meantime, think about what beliefs you hold that you would be hard pressed to abandon, and those that you would easily abandon. Is there anything that would require enormous evidence for you to believe? (see Barry Bonds example above.)

I must refer anyone reading this blog to Christianity Today's excellent book review publication Books & Culture: A Christian Review. Although unweildy in size (it's big, not thick), the range of topics covered and the quality of the reviews are excellent. The highest praise I can give B&C is that it is a genuine book review publication, not simply a bunch of Christian reviewers saying nice things about Christian books. The thoughtful reviews are writtten mostly by scholars and writers (including a review in the latest issue by an Economics professor at my institution, George Mason University) who bring depth and breadth of expertise and disposition to their critiques. I particularly like the inclusion of evangelical and Catholic reviewers and books, and every theological variant in between. A broad spectrum of topics are covered, both Christian and secular, though the emphasis is on Christian-oriented books. For example, the July/August 2006 issue has reviews of books on how container ships "changed the world", on lying and Augustinian theology, and most importantly, on Why we no longer believe in sports but should. I have discovered several books through this publication that I might not have otherwise found. I cannot commend B&C to you strongly enough--go subscribe now.