If I Were God…

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in God's Character | Comments Off

It seems like there is just no such thing as having too many articles about the "Problem of Evil" in the blogosphere, these days. In the interest of living that out, here's another one. The way I'd like to approach this today is from the perspective of why people feel like the Problem of Evil is as significant as they feel it is. After all, when I hear about people using this to describe their disbelief ...

Eternal Punishment vs. Finite Crime

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Christian Living | 8 Comments »

In Old Testament times, people would take revenge against one another in ways that were absolutely shocking. There was no balance. It was not uncommon to kill someone for being disrepectful or for some petty crime. Then God stepped in with the whole "eye for an eye" thing to keep things a bit more fair when it came to punishment and justice. Later, in the New Testament, Jesus raises the bar even more. It was no ...

Take My Word for It

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | Comments Off

Several months ago, I had written about the idea of non-believers not accepting the books of the New Testament as evidence of actual events. What they are looking for is "extra-biblical texts" to corroborate what the Bible says. In like fashion, I recently heard one atheist mention (several times, actually) that a person's personal testimony of an experience with God would not be sufficient evidence to make a claim of His existence. Now, to a degree, ...

Why We Still Sin

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Christian Living | 2 Comments »

Last week, I posted my thoughts on the subsitutionary atonement of Christ. At the end of that post, I posed a question that I promised to address this week. It's "next week" now, so I suppose I should keep my promise and address this issue. Interestingly enough, to a large degree my perspective given in last week's post is actually quite heavily rooted in the concepts I'm sharing this week. In other words, the question of ...

Substitutionary Atonement

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Sin | Comments Off

Recently I was listening to some atheists discussing their concerns regarding the idea of the substitutionary atonement of Christ. Basically, that's just a big, fancy term for the fact that Jesus died for our sins. Nothing more complicated than that. Here is the misunderstanding that I heard based on how the conversation went. They don't get how someone else can be punished in our place. If we are the ones who have sinned, then someone else ...

Omniscience vs. Free Will

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in God's Character | 2 Comments »

In a recent atheist podcast that I subscribe to, the hosts were discussing the idea of the omniscience of God and how this somehow contradicts the idea of free will. Their argument was basically that, if God already knows what you're going to do and the things you or I will choose before you do so, then you and I have not choice but to make that choice. Normally, I am quite pleased and even pleasantly surprised ...

Extraordinary Events

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Miracles | Comments Off

If I had a nickel for every time I heard a non-believer claim that "extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence" I would be independently wealthy. The irony of this is that usually it's the people who claim to be the most intellectually honest. In fact, these are the group who are quick to cast dispersions on Christians (or other theists) for committing the very crime for which they themselves are guilty. The man credited for this idea ...

Who Designed the Designer?

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | Comments Off

Originally, I had wanted to write something about a quote that I had read from Richard Dawkins where he said something to the effect that, by all outward appearances, if we didn't know any better, it looks like life is the product of design. I couldn't find that quote, however, but instead found a large number of hits for a different quote from Dawkins. Over and over again, I found countless hits (and now, here is ...

Atheist or Agnostic?

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Christian Living | Comments Off

In the past, I had often thought a certain way regarding the difference between someone who claims to be an atheist versus someone claiming to be agnostic. My understanding had been that atheism was a very arrogant claim. My understanding was that to be an atheist, one was claiming that there was certainly no God. It seemed to me that this was an impossible claim unless one knew first-hand of the existence of every single ...

Oral Tradition and the Telephone Game

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | Comments Off

Today, I heard what was most likely the most laughable argument against the historicity of the gospels that I have ever heard. It was a comparison of the oral tradition which passed down the accounts of Jesus of Nazareth until they were written down against the game of "Telephone." Basically, the idea here was based on the idea that most scholars put the first written gospels at between 20 and 25  years after Christ's death, burial ...