Articles - God

 September 20, 2016, will mark the 40th anniversary of a monumental event that serves as one of the foundational underpinnings of the apologetics legacy and approach of the Warren Center. The Warren-Flew debate on the existence of God held on the campus of North Texas State University (now The University of North Texas) attracted audiences ranging from five to seven thousand nightly September 20-23, 1976. Some estimates of the size of the audience go as high as nine thousand. It was an amazing event. I am deeply grateful to God for allowing me to experience that “once in a lifetime” event forty years ago...

Former Time magazine correspondent, David Aikman, tells a powerful story involving eighteen American tourists who visited China in 2002. At the end of a busy day of visiting Beijing, the group’s activities for that particular day concluded with an evening lecture. The speaker was a young Chinese scholar who represented China’s premier academic research institute, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). What the group of American tourists heard from this young member of China’s academic elite was astonishing! Instead of the official old Communist dogma about religion being the opium of the people and missionaries being tools of Western society’s imperialism, the Chinese speaker said...

In their book, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Brand and Yancey cite the Greek poet Sophocles who said that none of the wonders of the world is more wondrous than the human body. Dr. Warren wrote, “When one considers his body he is aware of the fact that it is a marvelous mechanism—a single system which is comprised of sub-systems, all of which must work together in concert if one is to live or even to be very healthy” (We Can Know that God Is 4).

May is the month when we in America honor mothers and motherhood with our observance of Mother’s Day. I well remember from graduate study days how the late Dr. Thomas B. Warren, the apologist for whom Warren Apologetics Center is named, would say, “Fellows, the world will never be the same when you awake one morning and realize your mother is no longer a part of it.” The absolute value of a mother!

Henry Morris, in his book The Heavens Declare the Glory of God, suggests  “. . . [A]pril 1 would be a good holiday for atheists . . .” (93). The Bible says, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1; 53:1).  Paul stated that those “who do not like to retain God in their knowledge” (Romans 1:28) are futile in their thoughts (Romans 1:21). Futile here means “unintelligent, without insight” (Rogers and Rogers 317). Sometimes it is the case that atheists boast of their philosophy as being “intellectual” and “scientific.” However, the Bible labels anti-God philosophy as foolish (cf. Romans 1:21). The Bible identifies those who reject the evidence for God (Romans 1:20-21) as “professing to be wise,” but in actuality, they have become fools (Romans 1:22).  All of this reminds me of the story by G. K. Chesterton, entitled “The Oracle of the Dog,” from The Incredulity of Father Brown, in which we find the observation: “It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense” (qtd. in Rees 158).

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) wrote, “God is and all is well” (qtd. in Bartlett 528). In a time of terror and tragedy, doom and destruction, our spirits need beckoned to a place above the pain and terror where there is hope in the midst of hopelessness; security in the midst of insecurity. Such a place is found in the knowledge of God (Isaiah 26:3). Even the season of Spring can point us upward to a place of peace, tranquility, and cheer, though the drums of war are beating loudly. Robert Browning wrote:

In His book, Why Religion Matters, Huston Smith contrasted the worldview that believes God is the ultimate reality with the view of secular materialism that believes there is no reality (no God) beyond the physical universe—the physical laws of nature and the chemical properties of matter. Smith says, “How seriously we should regard the evidence for or against [either view] . . . depends on how much is at stake.” He continues, “How much is at stake! I repeat that phrase because . . . the stakes are high” (40).

They lived in different centuries: George Romanes lived and died during the 19th century. Ernst Mayr was born in 1904 and died in 2005. However, Romanes and Mayr had something major in common—both were devoted students of Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary biology.

The news has come from Great Britain that the Girl Guides and Brownies organizations, forerunners to Girl Scouts of America, are making what has been called one of the biggest changes in their 103 years of history. The change involves removing all references to God in the traditional Girl Guides pledge and replacing it with “a more individualistic pledge to ‘be true to myself.’” Stephen Evans, campaign’s manager of the National Secular Society of Great Britain said: “By omitting any explicit mention of God or religion the Guide Association has grasped the opportunity to make itself truly inclusive and relevant to the reality of 21st century Britain” (qtd. in Bingham, Guides)

November 22, 2013, marks the 50th anniversary of the death of one of America’s most popular presidents. On this day in 1963, young and dynamic President John F. Kennedy, was in a motorcade in downtown Dallas, TX. Three shots rang out, and young Jack Kennedy was dead. It was 11:30 a.m. in Dallas.

Two Books

Etched in stone in one of the most visible places on the campus of Yale University is the slogan—“For God, For Country, and for Yale.” Students walk past these words every day. In a different sense, Yale’s progressive faculty and administrators began to “walk past” the deep meaning of these words many years ago. One wonders if they have now gone so far that they are at the point of no return.

June 17, 1963 – It was the day when what has been called “the most tragic decision in the history of the United States” was announced by the highest Court of the land (Moore, One Nation Under God 362). The response of U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia was: “Somebody is tampering with America’s soul. . . .” By an overwhelming eight-to-one ruling, the Supreme Court drove a final stake into the heart of Bible reading and prayer in America’s public schools. Our nation’s public educational system has never recovered from the decision announced 50 years ago.

M. Louise Haskins (1908) captured the uncertainty of a new year in words that were quoted to the British Empire in the 1939 Christmas radio broadcast of King George VI. Haskins wrote:
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, “Give me a light, that I may tread safely into the unknown,” and he replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way” (Bartlett 881).

In her New York Times bestseller, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, conservative columnist, Ann Coulter, begins by citing the apostle Paul who wrote, “They exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creation rather than the Creator . . .” (1). In a later chapter on the fruits of evolution Coulter again references the first chapter of Romans and says:

Implications of the worldviews of Christian theism and antitheism are inferred from the first chapter of the New Testament Epistle to the Romans (Romans 1:18-32). A. T. Robertson wrote, “There people had already willfully deserted God. . . . The withdrawal of God’s restraint sent men deeper down. . . . [It is] the loss of God in the life of man” (330-31). They did not think it worthwhile (NIV), or did not see fit (NASV; ESV) to keep God in their minds. Vincent says, “They did not think God worth the knowing” (21). “[T]hey did not like to retain God in their knowledge” (v. 28, NKJV) means they “tested (Gk. dokimazo) God and made a decision about Him after a trial” (Rogers and Rogers 318). Lard says, “They preferred . . . to let the knowledge they had of [H]im perish from their minds. . . . They wished no farther acquaintance with [H]im” (62). This is the loss of God in human life that results from the loss of God in the belief system of the human mind.

In the prosecution of the Nuremburg trials, following World War II, the German Nazis were tried for the heinous crime of torturing and murdering six million Jewish men, women, and children. In his closing address, Robert H. Jackson, a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and one of the Nuremburg prosecutors, argued that the Nazis were being tried by a “higher law” which “transcends the provincial and transient” (Warren and Flew 41).

The Bible says, “While the [E]arth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease" (Genesis 8:22, English Standard Version). In his 1856 four-volume set, Sacred Philosophy of the Seasons, Henry Duncan wrote: “The changes of the seasons display, in themselves, a remarkable and beneficient arrangement; and the adaptations . . . during these changes, afford ample materials for a beautiful and striking exhibition of the power, wisdom, and goodness of the Creator” (Winter iii).

Although I do not agree with his endorsement of High Criticism’s approach to the Bible, the early 20th Century preacher and homiletics teacher in Yale Divinity School, Halford Luccock, was on target when he addressed the extravagant materialism and secularism of the early 1920s and the seemingly hopeless depression days of the 1930s. Luccock described “The Great Depression,” during which he was living and preach, in the following words

It is not without great significance that, as Christian philosophers and theologians wrestle with a recent great assault on faith in America made by a group of so-called New Atheists, economists wrestle with what many are calling the worst financial crisis during the past seventy-five years. In an essay published in The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 2007)

In his 2006 book, The God Delusion, which is a militant attack against belief in God, the British atheist-scientist, Richard Dawkins, suggests that “. . . the greatest of [the Founding Fathers of the American Republic] might have been atheists. . . . [T]heir writings on religion in their own time leave me no doubt that most of them would have been atheists in ours” (38-39). With such a palpably false statement one could only hope that Professor Dawkins is a better scientist than he is an historian.