Gairney Bridge

I went to see the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed yesterday evening. I had free tickets, complements of Campbellsville University. I was actually planning to go see the movie during a Saturday matinee (cheaper, of course), but free is pretty hard to beat. The theater was pretty full (80-90%), and there was even a good bit of applause at the end (unusual for a movie these days, in my experience).

There has been a lot of hoopla over the movie, and most of it has not been of the kind variety. For instance, if one were to peruse the collection of reviews at the Rotten Tomatoes website, one might leave with the distinct impression that this is a real stinker (as of today, Expelled only generated a 9% rating, which translates into only 2 out of 23 reviews being positive — and one of those positive reviews was from Christianity Today!). Expelled has its own particular ax to grind, to be sure, but in looking at the comments of many of the reviewers, let’s just say the local hardware store must have had a sale on wood-cutting equipment. Consider some of the following comments:

One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time…. (Jeanette Catsoulis of the New York Times; that’s a mighty lofty accolade, but I can’t find where Mrs. Catsoulis reviewed An Inconvenient Truth or any of Michael Moore’s documentaries, so I’m not sure how accurate the measuring bar is on this one)

The movie itself is an example of design by faith and emotion rather than intelligence, defined as rationality grounded in proof. (Nell Minow of the Chicago Sun-Times)

[Y]ou need to see this movie because these people are not going away… (oops, that’s not really a film critic, but someone who calls herself the “Flick Filosopher” ranting on her own blog)

Using loaded language and loaded imagery, Stein and Co. … equate evolution with atheism, lay responsibility for the Holocaust at the feet of Charles Darwin, interview and creatively edit biologists and others (scientists apparently “cast” for their eccentric appearance) to make them look foolish for insisting that science, not religion, can explain creation. (Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel, who apparently saw a different movie than the one he wrote the review about; actually, Mr. Moore’s review deserves special mention for the venomous nature of his own rant, which rivals that of the “Flick Filosopher” above, sans the profanity).

It probably does say something about the controversial nature of a film when a reviewer must resort to a steady stream of fallacious appeals to ridicule in order to write the review. Why not comment on production values instead of another rant on behalf of the Richard Dawkinses of the world? Isn’t that what film critics are supposed to do, rather than fancy themselves to be spokesmen for science? But I digress.

If you’ve made it through this much of my musings, you’re probably wondering if the movie is worth seeing.

I’m not a big documentary fan, so I may not be the best judge in that area. The film is well-made if you’re into that sort of thing. The production values are high and Mr. Stein is an entertaining fellow (he even pokes fun at himself a bit). It also seems to do a good job of documenting the various cases of folks that have received some sort of scrutiny for daring to suggest anything resembling intelligent design (which the film mentions is unfairly defined as creationism; this is one of the reasons that I think Mr. Moore, above, may have been mistaken about which movie he was viewing). There are a couple of slow spots, but overall it moves well and keeps the interest of the moviegoer. Possibly the most entertaining portions of the film are the interviews with those scientists who are opposed to ID — some are very nice, some of quite nasty, and at least one (William Provine) is, well, a bit difficult to classify (you’ll just have to see him for yourself!). There is a segment near the end of the film where Stein interviews Dawkins that is just about worth the price of admission, so I suspect the segment will find its way onto YouTube one of these days.

I would like to see this movie do well, and it does need to be seen by those who might be unaware of the academic escapades that are affecting some scientists. It is difficult to get a valuable evaluation when the well has been poisoned by one side in particular prior to the opening of the movie (but it is amusing to find movie reviewers suggesting that folks with Ph.Ds aren’t really scientists). Training in logical thinking isn’t really popular either these days, so fallacies aren’t hard to come by anymore. If that was a stock that was being publicly traded, I’d be buying shares and telling all my friends to do the same.

If you’ve got $8 or $10 to burn, go see the movie. I doubt many will be swayed one way or another by it, though. It does put forth some stories that otherwise might get buried by the mainstream media. But the fervor this is generating should be proof enough that something is amiss. Someone doth protest too much methinks.

If interested, viewing this interview between R.C. Sproul and Ben Stein on the subject of naturalism might be profitable.

UPDATE: In the original post, I forgot to include this quote from a local paper (that would be the paper published by our friendly neighborhood giga-church, the same I referenced in a post below). You’re probably going to hear complaints from some of the evolutionists featured in the film, about how they’ve been misrepresented, etc. However, consider these words from one of the folks associated with Expelled:

Although some interviewees are raising a ruckus about the film, Steve Schmidt, director of distributing, said ‘every person was told this film would be about the conflict between Intelligent Design and Evolution, each person was given the questions in advance if they desired, each person was paid, and every one of them cashed their check. Our conscience is totally clean regarding the film — we misrepresented nothing.’

In this case, following the money trail would be a pretty good indicator, imho.

I recently purchased a copy of Tim Keller’s new book The Reason for God. At this point I’ve only managed to make it through the introduction and part of chapter one, but so far, so good. Keller’s book is primarily aimed at the skeptic, but he also is writing for the Christian who has perhaps not “thought out” the reasons for the faith (per 1 Peter 3:15). For those interested, Keller has also posted a series of sermons in conjunction with the topics in the book, and they are available for free here.

While reading the book this morning, I came across this quote which I found interesting and encouraging:

… A widespread belief in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century [was] that religion would weaken and die out as the human race became more technologically advanced. This view saw religion as playing a role in human evolution. We once needed religion to help us cope with a very frightening, incomprehensible world. But as we become more scientifically sophisticated and more able to understand and control our own environment, our need for religion would diminish, it was thought. But this has not happened and this ’secularization thesis’ is now largely discredited. Virtually all major religions are growing in number of adherents. Christianity’s growth, especially in the developing world, has been explosive. There are now six times more Anglicans in Nigeria alone than there are in all of the United States. There are more Presbyterians in Ghana than in the United States and Scotland combined. Korea has gone from 1 percent to 40 percent Christian in a hundred years, and experts believe the same thing is going to happen in China. … In most cases, the Christianity that is growing is not the more secularized, belief-thin versions predicted by the sociologists. Rather, it is a robust supernaturalist kind of faith, with belief in miracles, Scriptural authority, and personal conversion. … Religion is not just a temporary thing that helped us to adapt to our environment. Rather it is a permanent and central aspect of the human condition. This is a bitter pill for secular, non-religious people to swallow. Everyone wants to think that they are in the mainstream, that they are not extremists. But robust religious beliefs dominate the world. There is no reason to expect that to change.

The thing that struck me most in this quote is the sheer numbers of Christians in places like Nigeria and Ghana. We Americans tend to focus our gaze too much on our shores, and we often fail to see what the Lord is doing in other parts of the world. It reminds me when I was informed a year or so ago that there were more ARPs in Pakistan than in the US (about 4 to 1 if I remember correctly)!

The predictions of religious extinction (to borrow a line from Mark Twain) have not only been greatly exaggerated, but apparently did not end in the early 20th century. For example, Keller cites a book by an anthropologist named A.F.C. Wallace , where Wallace states:

The evolutionary future of religion is extinction. … Belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as the result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge.

The book in which those words were written was published a year before I was born, in 1966. The prediction has not come true, and the evidence speaks to the contrary, as Keller notes.

Later, while each lunch with my wife, I was reading a newspaper published by a local giga-church (yes, they are that large, and yes, they have their own weekly newspaper!) and saw an article about the upcoming controversial movie, Expelled. I have commented briefly on this elsewhere, and the blogosphere is seemingly ablaze over the movie already, so I see no need to add to the fervor. However, there was one quote in the article, taken from atheist/evolutionist P.Z. Myer in his interview with Ben Stein in the film, that I thought meshed nicely with the quotes above:

What we have to do is get to a place where religion is treated at the level it should be treated. That it’s something fun that people get together to do on the weekends and really doesn’t affect their life as much as it has been so far. … [Greater science literacy] is going to lead to the erosion of religion … and we’ll eventually get to the point where religion has taken that appropriate place as a side dish rather than a main course.

Given the observations above, not only does that sound hollow, but it sounds like the atheist version of Hal Lindsey, waiting for the consummation to come any day now, getting it all wrong again and again, but still persisting in the same old claims. I wonder if atheists have their own version of Dispensationalists?

I’m getting a little behind on posting these (very busy, out of town most of last week for a Board meeting and a short vacation!). This was preached on March 30, 2008 at Midlane Park ARP Church.

Now while they were on their way, some of the guard came into the city and reported to the chief priests all that had happened. And when they had assembled with the elders and consulted together, they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, and said, “You are to say, `His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we were asleep.’ “And if this should come to the governor’s ears, we will win him over and keep you out of trouble.” And they took the money and did as they had been instructed; and this story was widely spread among the Jews, and is to this day. ~ Matthew 28:11-15

Now 9/11 conspiracy theories and professional wrestling have at least one more thing in common: Jesse Ventura!

I suppose the next thing we’ll hear is about how Hulk Hogan’s title reign was completely orchestrated by Vince McMahon.

This comes is from Cornelius van Til, in A Christian Theory of Knowledge:

The atheist must assume that there is a difference in the truth value of various thoughts and ideas in order to debate with a Christian; he must say that we are far more than different, well-shaken bottles of pop. But in order to say this, he must assume the falsity of the worldview he claims to uphold. In short, he must assume that God exists in order to deny Him. And this is the transcendental claim in a nutshell: the existence of God must be assumed in order to debate it. Moreover, it must be assumed by all parties in the debate. Thus, once the debate has begun, it is over.

World Mag Blog posted a link to one of the two following videos. Remember the old Real Men of Genius beer commercials? Well, here’s a take-off called “Real Preachers of Genius.” Ouch!

Mr. Really Really Bad Preacher

Mr. Seeker-Sensitive Mega Church Guy

These are pretty funny, but they’re not as good as the “O-Mazing Grace” video at my buddy Trey’s blog…

Here are two sermons recently preached at Midlane Park Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church.

March 20, 2008: “The Humiliation of the Cross” (Matthew 27:33-44)

March 23, 2008:  “The End of the Cross” (Matthew 28:1-10)

A while back I wrote a post that featured links to two open letters written to the notorious atheist, Richard Dawkins. Along those lines, I came across this video, from James White’s website, where he features a clip from Dawkins and explains the fallacious nature of his attempts at his brand of materialistic reasoning.

In some ways, it is simply amazing that someone as obviously brilliant as Dawkins has to resort to crude ridicule in order mask his poor reasoning and logic in this area. It has been pointed out to him by folks like Alister McGrath (see here and here) that he does not really understand Christianity nor correctly represent it, but this does not detour him. I suppose it is not surprising, since Dawkins declared the following in the February 6, 1999 edition of The Guardian:

I’m like a pit bull terrier being released into the ring, as a spectator sport, to attack religious people.

Pit bulls don’t have to be honest or right or thoughtful, I suppose. They simply have to be vicious.

At any rate, the “celestial teapot” example (along with its more modern incarnations such as the “flying spaghetti monster”) might sound good on the surface, but it is a very weak analogy in the end. Bertrand Russell was the originator of the teapot argument; Joel McDurmon has this to say about the analogy:

[Modern atheists] claim that no one believes in the gods of ancient mythology: all (or most) people are, therefore, ‘atheists’ with regard to these gods. The atheists, including Dawkins, boast that they just go ‘one God further.’ This rhetorical saccharin vaporizes in the boil of real philosophy, and it doesn’t sweeten a thing. It is mere steam from the spout of Russell’s tea pot. It simply places the Christian God in the same category as ‘Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster,’ and is thus a categorical and definitional mistake. The object in question requires proof that is commensurate with the nature of the thing in question. Thus the existence of the God of Christianity cannot be determined by gratuitous parallels to material objects like dizzy tea pots or frightening pasta, and, while we do not have time here to line them all up, the Christian God is also qualitatively and categorically different than any of the pagan gods one can list. … It will take more than an attempt to straw-man the definition of God into something farcical and material, and then pretend you’ve ousted God from the universe. We can call this the ’straw-god’ fallacy. The real philosophical challenge is to disprove an all-powerful God Who created the material universe, upholds it, and thus transcends the material universe. Such a God defies any attempt to measure Him by finite standards, or call Him to any finite bar of judgment. For Him to stoop to meet such a standard would be for Him to deny both His Sovereignty and His own existence. The very act of submitting Himself for verification implies that someone else is the ultimate Judge and the ultimate standard. So, I will hear no more about tea pots. I will consider only arguments that tackle the existence of the kind of God who created tea, and the rest of the world for that matter. Once atheists start to become honest about this issue, then the ‘burden of proof’ will be re-established a bit more squarely, and the debate over God will move from the atheist’s comfortable tea-room of materialism, to the transcendental question that it is.

In short, when one makes a claim that the God of Christianity is like the gods of pagan religions (or of the ceramic and noodle variety), he is demonstrating that he really does not know what he is talking about (it would be closer to the truth to say I am just like George Washington or Julius Caesar, since we would at least be, as human beings, ontologically the same). He is making a serious logical and philosophical error in doing so. It might make for good-sounding rhetoric, and there may be times in which is satisfies the masses (to be honest, most people do not want to seriously think these things through in the first place), but it is neither sufficient nor sophisticated argument.

I was reading an article this morning about the innovation (back in the day!) of moving from scrolls to codices (essentially the book format) for recording manuscripts (hey, you get to use both sides of the page!). It reminded me of this video I watched a while back on “Medieval Tech Support.” Very funny and clever.

And speaking of tech support, does anyone have a clue how to imbed videos on this blog (instead of just placing links)?

My wife pointed me to this news story, which is so incredibly strange that it is almost unbelievable (I did check Snopes before posting this). It sounds more like a science fiction story, and it might actually be humorous if it weren’t so tragic.

In Australia, an 81-year-old man downloaded plans from the internet and used them to build a robot that he programmed to kill himself. Seriously. It was all very elaborate and very well planned. Once again, were this not the loss of a human life, it might actually be a funny story.

The taking of a human life — even our own — is not a funny matter. Human beings are created in the image of God, and destroying that image brings dire consequences (Genesis 9:6).  When suicide is reported in Scripture, it is not spoken of in glowing terms (1 Samuel 31:4; Acts 1:16-18). The Westminster Larger Catechism gives this answer for question 136, which asks, “What are the sins forbidden in the sixth commandment?”

 The sins forbidden in the sixth commandment are, all taking away the life of ourselves, or of others, except in case of public justice, lawful war, or necessary defense; the neglecting or withdrawing the lawful and necessary means of preservation of life; sinful anger, hatred, envy, desire of revenge;all excessive passions, distracting cares; immoderate use of meat, drink, labor, and recreations; provoking words, oppression, quarreling, striking, wounding, and: Whatsoever else tends to the destruction of the life of any.

I cannot think of what must have been weighing upon this poor man to end his life in such a way. Much prayer should be offered up for his grieving family in all this. And may those who despair over the things of this world be like Job and see the wondrous grace of God even in the midst of their despair.