What We Like About AiG

I appreciate this point. As I’ve said before, while it’s good to seek answers, this over-reliance on answers can tend to discourage questions by default – it can communicate the idea that we’ve already answered all the most important questions, and therefore even asking anything is a sign of disobedience or rebellion.

I hope that those who are invested in apologetics will move toward a more open and humble posture rather than letting fear of kids leaving the faith cause them to clamp down even harder on questions (and therefore honesty).

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Yes, isn’t that like saying because counting exists, apples will count themselves?

Did you guys consider How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, a Black scholar?

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Yes. What is it that Lennox says? The laws of mathematics says that $1000 dollars plus $1000 dollars is $2000. But the law of mathematics never put anything in my wallet.

And sometimes our answer needs to be, “I don’t know.” Maybe we can work on finding an answer together.

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I haven’t read the book, just listened to Voddie Baucham talk about it on YouTube. He has serious concerns about Ibram X. Kendi and his positions from a biblical standpoint.

Baucham is also black, and talks about racism and growing up in South Central LA. You might find listening to him on that issue not only helpful, but engaging.

He has a new book which I also haven’t read, Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe

by Voddie Baucham Jr.

That’s a rather odd way of looking at science, Craig. As I understand it, science is built on a foundation of observation, measurement and mathematics. When I sit at the computer and load up Visual Studio and it tells me my unit tests are failing, I don’t respond by saying “Yes, that’s a very Kantian viewpoint, but have you ever considered what Schiller had to say on the subject?” If I did, I’d get a compiler error. Similarly, I don’t think that anyone in a radiometrics lab even thinks about Kant or Schiller when they’re plotting isochrons. More likely, they’re thinking about how they can charge their wealthy clients in the oil industry more for doing it.

Your point about John Lennox and Stephen Hawking is a good one, but I’d argue that Hawking falls off the rails not because he ignores philosophy, but because he veers away from science and into philosophy. It’s a completely different discipline.

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Conveniently. He is also big in the homeschooling cult world of family integrated church where people aren’t allowed to use birth control, girls are treated as property and fathers think it is fine to arrange marriages between teens and much older men. His corporal punishment advice is cited in child abuse cases (google Baucham and “viper in diapers” if you want to know how he views children), his eternal subordination of the Son theology is heretical, and he makes the family the primary unit of God’s kingdom instead of the church, and conveniently in the family, the patriarch is the prophet, priest, and king. All around bad news, don’t read that guy’s books. Plus Fault Lines was full of shoddy scholarship and got plagiarism allegations.

https://www.martyduren.com/2021/03/30/fault-lines-by-voddie-baucham-book-review-part-1/
https://www.martyduren.com/2021/04/11/fault-lines-by-voddie-baucham-book-review-part-2/

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So I guess this would be something that we encourage Ken Ham to aspire to.

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Or uranium mining

I guess one of the problems is that knowledge has become so massive that none of us really can remotely hope to be the Rennaissance Person of yesteryear. One cannot really think of Rene Descartes or Francis Bacon as mere scientists. Although their views have long been supplanted by a far broader picture of science, they would have been called philosophers who pounded the drum of turning to observation and experiment over sitting around debating what Aristotle or Plato said and deducing “truth from that”. Inductive and deductive reasoning have their origins in philosophy.

Newton developed the theory of gravitation and is one of the major developers of calculus (the other being Leibniz). Leibniz’s symbolic representations of calculus are used to this day, unlike Newton’s, which we only see in mechanics and only the fluxon part, not the integrals. I think Newton was a principal architect in the beginnings of the calculus of variations. However, Leibniz is also known as a philosopher. Newton spent the latter part of his life largely dabbling in theology.

There is also metaphysics, which Kant did write a book on.

I guess it’s true that we tend to have separated academic disciplines and most of them have evolved and developed highly sophisticated languages that are often difficult to integrate intelligibly. As a result, philosophy class is over in the Arts because it often deals with questions of why we are here and so forth. Most of the time, to be welcomed into the guild of science, philosophy, arts, you have to be vastly read in the respective domain and a lot of times, that means you don’t have the depth you really need in some other domain to talk fully conversantly, or you can only hope to achieve a certain subset of depth.

Nevertheless, all said, in principle, philosophy is supposed to include all of it. Practically speaking though, they become disparate disciplines dominating in their own monumental silos (maybe even for practical reasons), where nobody dares to climb down from their high tower and wander about the campus anymore.

Since I began my university aspirations as an artist and came out as a physicist, I would say that the transition point began when I was journeying through philosophy. I thought I would eventually find my way back to philosophy, but grasping the nuts and bolts of science has basically become a lifelong endeavor to which I can find no reasonable path of return.

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Voddie Baucham tries to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement. Most Blacks would probably consider him to be a traitor, like Kanye West, or the enslaved men who tipped off the authorities about Denmark Vesey’s planned rebellion. A particular Nabisco cookie comes to mind.

Dr. Kendi is a scholar, a professor, a NY Times Bestselling author, and a voice for civil rights. I don’t care what religion he follows. Right now I’m reading a book he edited called " Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019"

I agree. I’m agnostic - and I agree. Unfortunately the YEC often do not return the favor. The one thing they dislike more than atheists are Christian “compromisers” who accept science and evolution.

It helps to point out that Christianity begins with acceptance of the Resurrection, and there are many interpretations of Genesis, none of which are doctrine*. Even Ken Ham will admit this much, but then (sometimes in the says sentence) add that the Resurrection requires a basis in Genesis.

* I make this point often; it is a great way to knock a YEC off their anti-science script and into a discussion of theology.

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Indeed, yes. YEC “science” is rooted and grounded in YEC interpretation of scripture. Digressions into science are just that: digressions. The root cause of their poor handling of science is their poor interpretation of scripture. That’s the place to be.

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I don’t have a position on this, as I haven’t studied it. And it is “controversial.” But it is also held by mainstream theologians such as Ware and Grudem–“both Ware and Grudem insisted that their position was in keeping with Nicene orthodoxy, had historical precedent, and was firmly grounded in the scriptural witness.” So it is disputed, but to call it heretical is a stretch.

Are you saying that all homeschooling is a “cult,” or referring to a specific variation? If it is the former, that is a pretty broad brushstroke condemning homeschooling.

No, they were pushed to modify their heretical position when they got smacked down by the ETS. They now make all sorts of distinctions about functional subordination. It’s a transparent bid to prop up their deficient gender theology with analogy to the Trinity and it’s telling that the only proponents of this view of the Trinity are also hard-core complementarians or full-on patriarchy embracers. No thanks. It’s controversial because it’s tied to all sorts of misogynistic assertions.

I was homeschooled and I currently homeschool. No, I was referring to the teachings, practices, and community standards of the Family Integrated Church movement, which produces bad fruit all over the place. I have personally seen it destroy lives.

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Thank you for pointing this out, Christy. Such a shame, my wife and I enjoyed his book ‘Expository Apologetics’. However, that is probably fairly isolated from the other craziness that you cite.

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