A Book Review of Let Freedom Ring

I read a historic novel Let Freedom Ring (Thorndike Press). Al and JoAnna Lacy are the authors. The story takes place in the 19th century and centers around Russian characters struggling to maintain their Christian faith under repressive Czarist regimes. The book is packed with adventures involving conflicts between ordinary Russians and the dreaded Cossacks. Eventually a small group of Russians manage to save their lives, find their way out of the country and immigrate to the United States.

One part of the book was particularly striking to me. Chapter Nine, pages 190-191 contain the passage. The Czarist government had become callous to the needs of the people. But what was interesting was the route by which this came about. One of the main characters pointed out that in the prior century a combination of governmental promises and apathy among the populace led people to place too much trust in their government. Political leaders, acting on their greedy impulses, became increasingly powerful and abusive.

This parallels what is going on in America today. Apathy is pervasive and increasing power in the hands of greedy legislative and executive officials all too common. The trust placed in government officials is way out of proportion to what is merited. History shows that trends toward ever centralized and expanded government power erode the freedom of those governed. It may take some time before the ugliness of the power shift becomes apparent but it will. There is something pathetic about people placing too much faith and trust in the power elites of their society. It's a form of self-emasculation which burdens posterity with the consequences of the foolish choices made by their forefathers.

Creation or evolution - do we have to choose?

Over at "More Than Words", I've begun blogging/reviewing my way through Dr. Denis Alexander's new book in favour of theistic evolution, "Creation or Evolution: Do we have to choose?"

David Anderson

Book Review - John Byl: The Divine Challenge on Matter, Mind, Math and Meaning

A couple of months ago I gave a presentation entitled "Is belief in divine creation rational?", which you can listen to on-line.

In that talk, I concentrated on one particular line of argument. Consistent materialists ultimately have nothing to say to us - because consistent materialism can easily be shown to be unable to explain the basis for the very acts of rational discourse and logical argumentation. The very manner in which they go about their business - assuming before they begin in the reality of consciousness, minds and rationality - refutes them. Turning this around, we have a solid proof for the reality of God who has made us in his image, the so-called "transcendental argument" - because if you assume anything to the contrary, you have no basis on which to prove anything else at all.

Well as I say, that's all covered in my presentation. This blog post is a book review, of John Byl's "The Divine Challenge: On matter, mind, math & meaning". I had not heard of Byl's book at the time I gave my talk, and wish I had, because it would have been ideal to recommend afterwards when I was asked for further reading material.



John Byl is Professor of Mathematics and Head of the department of Mathematical Sciences at Trinity Western University, British Columbia in Canada. He has a Ph. D. in astronomy from the University of British Columbia. In this book, he seeks to make a comprehensive overview of naturalism and its power (or not) to explain reality, particularly in relation to the three inter-related "worlds" of matter, mind and mathematics.

I am convinced that this is the territory which theists today need to concentrate on if they are to succeed in rebutting the arguments of atheists. When we talk about these issues, we begin challenging the foundations of the atheist world-view. It is a common debating ploy, and a superficially plausible one, for today's atheists to say "we shall not believe in a God until his existence is rationally proved to us; as yet, we find all such proofs lacking, and hence we do not believe." This is to make atheism the default, and to excuse it the task of having to justify its own set of assumptions and their implications - including the foundations for the very concept of a rational proof. Once theists start talking about these things, the atheist soon finds himself in very big trouble. If you've never heard an atheist utterly dismantled using this method, then you should be downloading Professor Greg Bahnsen's audio debate with Professor Malcolm Stein - The Great Debate - Does God Exist?, or reading Douglas Wilson against Chrishopher Hitchens.

I've learnt a lot by reviewing debates including the ones above. Byl, though, has practically provided us with a primer for the theoretical material behind such debates. Like myself, Byl is a mathematician by training (though unlike myself he's one with a professorship!). I've found that mathematics can be something of a closed world to outsiders, and few understand its fundamental significance in the universe. Byl unfolds it masterfully, explaining the intimate and yet inexplicable (from a naturalist point of view) connections between it and physical reality. Mathematics appears from one angle to be entirely abstract. Throughout history, its practitioners have discovered concepts and theorems which appear to have no even remotely possible connection to material reality. But, time and again, those discoveries have later been found out to be reflected in a very profound way in the physical universe. Some mathematical discovery of the past has suddenly been found to be a key to understanding some empirical phenomenon, and a new advance has been made in one of the physical sciences.

Then there is the connection between matter and the mind. What is consciousness? How can it be accounted for? On what basis can we expect our minds to be reliable? What is the connection between our abstract thoughts and reality? How can our minds influence the physical world? What is the connection between the mind and the brain? What is the cause of our thoughts? What about free will? How is it that our minds apparently have the capacity to understand reality, and how can this be accounted for? What is chance, and in what sense can it be said to be a cause of anything? Byl discusses these and a whole host of related issues in a scholarly yet easy to read style. His research is comprehensive - the bibliography of works cited runs to 11 pages, and I never got the impression that Byl had cited a work other than because it advanced the argument he was making. The authors quoted run from Calvin to Chomsky, and Darwin to Derrida.

Byl asks a lot of questions which will make the read think, "Why have I never asked that?" Today's Internet atheists take enormous number of things for granted, but they are not alone - practically everybody does; without doing so, we couldn't get on with life. Byl unpacks the concept of a "worldview" as an interpretative grid for explaining reality, and then discusses the tests which can be applied to worldviews in order to test their relative strengths and weaknesses. The core of the book is as he then applies these tests to naturalism. Can naturalism account for all the things which we take for granted. Again and again, Byl surveys the lie of the land, and then gives us the naturalists present conclusions on the matter - again and again, concluding either that some phenomena (consciousness, mathematics) is either inexplicable and that we must place our faith in some future discovery, or that that phenomena will have to be written off as illusional and not an actual part of reality. Here's Francis Crick, one of the men who discovered the structure of DNA, on the origin of life:

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to be satisfied to get it going. (p92)

And here he is again, dismissing individual identity, minds and consciousness and much else besides as mere illusion:

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that "You", your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (p7)

Byl makes the point very effectively that if naturalism has (as indeed it does), to ultimately write off almost every aspect of reality as either inexplicable or illusional, then this really amounts to no more than saying that naturalism is a non-starter when it comes to explaining reality. Any worldview which cannot account for the irrefutable facts of existence, is not a worldview which a person can rationally embrace.

Byl gives further consideration to viewpoints from beyond naturalism, briefly examining postmodernism and existentalism. This section is briefer, but he does enough to show their self-refuting nature. The remainder of the book is taken up as Byl rises to the challenge of demonstrating that Christianity gives a coherent explanation of the various phenomena which he has described. The Bible's view of a triune God who has created all things and created man in his image is shown to be the ultimate Ockham's razor: it requires none of the dodges or despair that naturalist writers end up in, but gives a credible account of the various phenomena relating to minds, matter and mathematics and the various inter-relations between them. More than that, it also explains, through the Bible's history of mankind's rebellion against God and original sin, why naturalists are so keen to chose another explanation! Byl is also helpful in explaining that Christianity is though vastly more than a mere system of correct philosophy; it is God's loving plan to save us and to bring us to know him, through Jesus Christ.

I appreciated this book particularly as a mathematician. When I was at university, I observed that the proportion of atheists was very low amongst the "mathmos". Mathematicians are by default realists in their work - approaching new theorems as discovery, not invention. Mathematics, in its apparent structure, elegance and universality resists naturalism at a very fundamental level, and Byl's book refreshed me by explaining how that was so in a very straightforward way.

I heartily recommend this book. It examines deep issues in an intellectually honest and thorough way, in words and at a pace that should not be beyond any reader. Byl is easy to follow; he has a deep enough grasp of what he's talking about to be able to explain it all simply. I suppose that this book won't be known about in many circles due to it being published by a Reformed Christian publisher - I hope that this review of mine will give it more of the publicity it deserves.

Go to Amazon (UK).

David Anderson

Some of the Parts by Gerry Rzeppa - An Appreciative Review

Intro

Not long ago, I received an offer via e-mail of a new book which is a response by Gerry Rzeppa to the "New Atheists": Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al. Sharon Rzeppa, Gerry's wife, had come across my Richard Dawkins parable and was kind enough to send me a copy.

There are quite a number of good book-length replies to the arguments of Dawkins etc., exposing the flaws in his assumptions, methodology and logic and so on. In that regard, I think the interested reader is now amply provided for. I myself have recently made a serious response available as an MP3 download or as a presentation via Google Video: "Is Belief In Divine Creation Rational?" (and you can find links to other good material from there).

Telling Stories

In the parable, though, I took a different approach. Jesus himself told many parables. In his parables, transcendent truths were explained using everyday illustrations. The heavenly was captured through the mundane. What is not understood by many of Jesus' interpreters, though, is that in telling parables it was not his unambiguous aim to explain truth. In fact, oftentimes through telling parables he intended to conceal truth.

Does that sound strange to you? Then you have a lot to learn about parables! Jesus' disciples themselves were confused as to what Jesus was aiming at, and they asked him why he spoke the way he did. Their question, and his answer, is recorded for us in Matthew's account of Jesus' life, in chapter 13, verses 10 onwards:

10 And the disciples came, and said to him, "Why do you speak to them in parables?"
11 He answered and said unto them, "Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. "
12 "For whosoever has, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever does not have, from him shall be taken away even what he has. "
13 "Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. "
14 "And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah, which says, By hearing you shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing you shall see, and shall not perceive: "
15 "For this people's heart is grown fat, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. "

The prophecy of Isaiah referred to by Jesus is one which is invoked more than once in the Bible (e.g. Acts 28:26, from a time about three decades later). It does not, then, refer only to what happened whilst Isaiah was alive. It contains a principle which is at work throughout the ages. Parables do not only teach us, but reveal us. They don't just pass on informaiton to us - they demonstrate information about us. What we understand from them depends not merely or even primarily upon our intellect, but upon the state of our heart. A well-told parable might leave the most brilliant mind completely confused - whilst being plain and simple to a little child.

Truth Concealed

I did not write my Richard Dawkins parable only so that Professor Dawkins and others of his ilk might see themselves in a mirror. I wrote it also so that they might not see themselves; I believe that Jesus was setting his followers an example. It is no surprise to me when I get e-mails in my inbox seeking to refute the parable with such brilliant arguments as "But I've seen photos of him!" and "Dawkins doesn't claim to be an omnipotent immaterial being!". When light is shone, not everybody comes in to it - some are driven further into darkness. Yes, that's deep. Yes, it's not always the appropriate response. But it is what the Bible tells us is indeed part of the purpose of God. The professor did read my parable; his angry response speaks well enough for itself. One commenter on Dawkins' own website said:

Don't you hate it when the Dark Side gets so clever?

To which the professor replied:

Clever?

What's clever about it?

Even the accent sounds more like Peter Atkins than me, although I admit it is at least better than the one they used on South Park

Richard

(http://richarddawkins.net/article,626,Does-Richard-Dawkins-exist,Anonymous#21307)

"Some of the Parts"

All of that now brings me to Gerry Rzeppa's "Some of the Parts". When Sharon offered me a copy of the book, I was expecting it was going to be an analysis and rebuttal of Dawkins' arguments in the manner of those already published. I was wrong! Gerry instead offers us an illustrated poem / story - short enough to be read in a quarter of an hour; but deep enough to leave you thinking for a good while afterwards. At first when I realised what its genre was I was fearful - such things are very hard to pull off and you have to be brave even to try! I need not have feared.

I really enjoyed Gerry's response. He tells us a story - and it's a story which brilliantly captures the antithesis between Christianity and atheism. Joyful submission and hyper-skeptical folly; intelligent trust and angry fist-shaking are both beautifully portrayed within the lines. The book does not present an intellectual argument - it tells instead a story which, like the parables of Jesus, has the power to confound the wise whilst comforting a child. Is that because it's a foolish, childish tale? No, it's because it isn't written to be an intellectual argument; it contains only some of the parts - the rest being supplied from the pre-understanding of the reader.

Gerry's tale is woven around a small boy, whose mother dies. Coming in from the rain (which I didn't realise the symbolism of in my first reading), he meets a mysterious figure called "The Maker". The Maker thinks thoughts. Our hero is led on a journey - the story is in parts. On his journey, he learns about the Maker's thoughts - present and future. Thoughts cannot be seen, or touched; and yet those thoughts are worth more than everything that can be.

Rzeppa's story is one which anyone whose thoughts run along Dawkinsian lines will not understand. Should they come across it, they will mock and deride it - a childish poem, full of silly fantasies, no rational arguments in it. But if you, like me, love the living God through Jesus, then you'll find that Gerry's tale is itself more than the sum of its parts. Such stories are mirrors - in them we see ourselves. Mockers will find mocking; less cynical hearts will find food for thought and challenge. What is in this allusion? What does this symbol really mean? The story is undergirded by Christian teachings, particularly man's creation in the image of God - but how much they are appreciated depends on what you bring with you as you read; did I bring more or less than Gerry as I read it? Is my understanding of that truth the same as his?

It's a short story. The response to the "New Atheists" needs to be manifold - replies must be made at different levels. Gerry's simple tale won't go down amongst the volumes of deep philosophy; but it will bring appreciative smiles to those who listen to it with ears to hear. Thank you Gerry and Sharon for sharing it with me.

Browsing another website, I found a Google advert leading me to Gerry's own website for the book, where you can read it online and order a hard copy: http://someofthepartsbook.com/

David

'The Case for the Real Jesus': A Book Review

Lee Strobel has written a new book called 'The Case for the Real Jesus.' It is a fitting sequel to his prior best seller 'The Case for Christ.' The book focuses attention on six challenges to Christianity that have been prominently publicized in recent years. The challenges involve rehashing old objections that have been answered previously. However, new generations tend to forget both the objections and the answers that overcame them.

Strobel repeats a pattern established with 'The Case for Christ' by interviewing reknown scholars and getting their responses to the six challenges. The six are as follows:

* Alleging that there are plausible ancient manuscripts providing different views than the four gospels

* Allegations that the church tampered with biblical texts and therefore the texts cannot be trusted

* New refutations of the resurrection

* Christian beliefs were actually copied from pagan religions

* Jesus was an imposter and did not fulfill messianic prophacies

* People are best advised to pick and choose that which they wish to believe about Jesus.

The interviewed scholars did a thorough job of debunking each challenge. Craig A. Evans, PhD in biblical studies and prolific writer and editor of more than 50 books, was questioned about the claim that our understanding of Christianity would change if certain ancient manuscripts were incorporated into what the church considers canonical writings. One manuscript specifically mentioned was the so called Gospel of Thomas. Critics have dated the writing of the "Gospel of Thomas" to around the middle of the first century. This would lend support to a number of arguments they make based on this assumption. Unfortunately that also seems to be the motive for the dating of Thomas.

The Evans interview, in many ways, paralleled the results of other interviews by bringing forth decisive evidence against charges that the church ignored plausible early writings that would have changed the nature of Christianity. An objective scholarly analysis would date Thomas to at least a century later than the time frame provided by critics. An examination of the actual evidence is revealing. Evans disclosed the facts that are downplayed or ignored by those touting Thomas as a canonical candidate. Evidence indicates that Thomas was written no earlier than the latter part of the second century which contrasts with dating from the middle of the first century proposed by critics. The reasons:

* More than half the New Testament writings were referred to or paralleled in Thomas including 14 or 15 of the 27 New Testament books. Some of this material was not recorded until the last decade of the first century. Evans, a noted New Testament scholar, was unaware of a single Christian writing prior to the year 150 that referenced as much of the New Testament as Thomas.

* Thomas was written in a number of languages which include Syriac- spoken in Syria. Syrian Christians did not have access to the four Gospels in their own language until the year 175 when a blend of the four Gospels known as the Diatessaron was recorded in Syriac. The content of Thomas reveals familiarity with the Diatessaron particularly its material arrangement and order. In addition only the Syrian church referred to Thomas as Judas Thomas; the name used in the Gospel of Thomas. Values of the Syrian culture of the second century- its ascetics and anti-commercialism, its mysticism and its elitism are all evident in Thomas.

* Most striking though are 114 sayings that appear in Thomas. Their order does not appear noteworthy in Greek or Coptic but in Syriac there are catchwords that act as memory aids. The catchwords link the sayings together. A word in one saying is indicated by the preceeding saying and so on.

Similar devastating refutations of revisionist Christian history are evident throughout 'The Case for the Real Jesus.' Strobel's other interviews reflect the knowing scholarship evidenced by Evans which contrasts with the selective use of evidence by church critics. Strobel has authored another fine Christian apologetic.