Clarifying salvation

After something I heard last night, I just wanted to take the time to clarify something for those non-Christians (and those Christians) who don't get it: A person who goes to Hell doesn't go because he is "a bad person" or "such a bad person". A person goes to Hell because he is a sinner; and we're all sinners. God just chooses to save some purely through his prerogative and not because of anything we do. So conversely, a person who goes to Heaven doesn't go because he's "a good person". A person goes to Heaven because Christ was a good person (in absolute terms, not "good" relative to other people).

Another common thing I hear is that someone goes to Hell "for not believing in Jesus". No, a person goes to Hell because he's a sinner. The poor soul just happened to reject the one thing, freely offered, that can save him from his sin.

Permalink | 13 Comments | Tags: Christianity | id 8010

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Faith alone, not deeds, required for salvation, papal preacher tells pontiff

Catholic Online: Faith alone, not deeds, required for salvation, papal preacher tells pontiff (via Sean):

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Even those who spend their lives serving the church must recognize that faith alone will save them, the preacher of the papal household told Pope Benedict XVI and his closest aides.

"Christianity does not start with that which man must do to save himself, but with what God has done to save him," Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa said in his Dec. 16 Advent meditation.

The preacher told the pope and top Vatican officials that they, like St. Paul, must avoid any temptation to think that the good works they have accomplished will guarantee their salvation.

"Gratuitous justification through faith in Christ is the heart" of St. Paul's preaching "and it is a shame that this has been practically absent from the ordinary preaching of the church," he said.

Father Cantalamessa said that the Protestant Reformation debate over the role of faith and works led the Catholic Church to focus so much on the need for the demonstration of faith in actions that it practically ignored the need for faith in the first place.

St. Paul, in his Letter to the Philippians, warned believers of the "mortal danger" of putting their own good works between them and Christ, as if the works would save them, Father Cantalamessa said.

Conversion to the fact that faith in Christ is the only means of salvation "is the conversion most needed by those who already are following Christ and have lived at the service of his church," the Capuchin said.

"It is a special conversion that does not consist in abandoning the bad, but abandoning the good, in a way," he said. "It means detaching oneself from everything one has done, repeating to oneself, 'We are useless servants; we have done only what was required.'"

Rock. I wonder if the text of that sermon is available online anywhere?

Permalink | 19 Comments | Tags: Religion | id 7866

20:46 (utc-6)
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Dawkins on morality and responsibility

Richard Dawkins on morality and responsibility:

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it...

Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? ... Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. ... But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.

Permalink | 5 Comments | Tags: Evolution | id 7838

13:24 (utc-5)

 

The "intelligent design" ruling

I just wrote a post on the recent "intelligent design" court ruling, in a comment.

Update: Ned Batchelder has a reasonable post on the issue:

I think the three or four paragraphs of disclaimer the ID folks wanted read was not such a big deal, and would have been a great jumping off point for a discussion about what science is and is not. An entire class (or more) could be given over to the topic. It wouldn't be teaching intelligent design, it would be teaching the philosophy of science with the current ID debate as a backdrop.

Note: comments are closed on this post so that I can keep any discussion centralized on post I linked to up top.

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Dr. Greg L. Bahnsen: ten years after, by Robert Meyer

Dr. Greg L. Bahnsen: ten years after, by Robert Meyer:

Dr. Bahnsen was opined by many as the most prolific Christian apologist in the last quarter of the 20th century in terms of defending the Christian perspective against the assaults of atheism.

In one [of his seminars,] entitled "Worldview Apologetics," Dr. Bahnsen told of when he first read the arguments of C.S. Lewis against naturalism, he starkly realized he would be able to debate anybody. After listening to several of Bahnsen's tapes, I had a similar awareness. If I was to diligently apply the methodology being taught, I too, could answer the critic. In the same lecture, Dr. Bahnsen exhorts his audience, telling them that anyone right down to the janitor sweeping the floor can effectively defend the faith via "presuppositional" argumentation. Bahnsen simplified and distilled the erudition of his own wise mentor, Cornelius Van Til.

The aspects of Dr. Bahnsen's approach that struck me were numerous. While Bahnsen was a scholar of no small magnitude, as he earned two degrees concurrently, he yet had a down-to-earth, bucolic approach that made him easy to understand and appreciate... Dr. Jacobs expressed his own thoughts about Greg Bahnsen, saying, "while he was one of the keenest minds in the world of Christian apologetics, he had a gentle heart and always stressed love in 'the battle.'

Too many followers of Bahnsen forget the spirit with which he conducted his apologetic, instead only remembering its content.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Religion | id 7675

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Clayton Cramer on ID

Clayton Cramer on ID:

Look, being persecuted and retaliated against isn't proof that Intelligent Design is correct, but the evolutionary establishment's foaming at the mouth suggests that ID has hit a nerve that "Creation science" never did. That's because Intelligent Design has a few proponents who are legitimate scientists, working in the fields of biochemistry and microbiology--and some of its criticisms are very powerful.

"... some of its criticisms are very powerful". That's all I've been saying. You fundamentally can't answer the question of origins scientifically. It's an historical question. However, the range of scientific disciplines can be queried for what they have to say about the subject. Evolution's proponents look for what they'd consider evidence of some species having their origin in the mutations of other species, while ID's proponents look for what they'd consider evidence for an intelligence having to be behind what we see in biology and other areas of science.

It's obviously going to be a judgement call of what you'd accept as evidence one way or the other, and that judgement will be determined by your prior philosophical commitments. If you have a prior commitment to a naturalistic explanation of our origins, you'll buy into evolution. If you don't, you might be willing to accept a supernatural explanation of our origins. But the important point to understand is that the ID scientists and the evolutionary scientists are on the exact same plane as far as evidence is concerned.

For instance, if the fossil record clearly showed very gradual changes in species over time from the simplest organisms to, say, humans, that'd be pretty compelling evidence that there was such an evolution. But, that's not what we find in the fossil record. On the other hand, if Behe is correct that certain structures we find in biology truly are irreducibly complex, that's pretty compelling evidence that they had to have been designed.

Permalink | 1 Comment | Tags: Evolution | id 7575

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C.S. Lewis on the problem of evil, or, C.S. Lewis the presuppositionalist

I've been discussing C.S. Lewis with a few friends from work, and I've mentioned that the first half of Mere Christianity is very presuppositional in nature. I just picked up my copy of what's one of the greatest books ever written and found exactly the passage I'm thinking of when I say that his argument is presuppositional in nature:

And, of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? And for many years [when I was an atheist] I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling "whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't all of your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?" But then that threw me back into another difficulty.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? ... Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

What he's talking about is typically called the problem of evil.

Permalink | 184 Comments | Tags: Religion | id 7085

04:14 (utc-5)

 

The inductive principle

One of the nicest illustrations of the futility of atheistic philosophy is the fact that the inductive principle -- essentially, the principle that past experience is a good predictor of future events, or in short, that "the future will be like the past" -- is simply without justification on an atheistic worldview. This is pretty bad, since the inductive principle is a precondition for all science. I mentioned this about three years ago, but surprisingly haven't brought it up since. To elaborate, I'll quote from my favorite section of Greg Bahnsen's Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (pg 618-19. I've inlined parts of the footnotes):

Unbelievers who have been both brilliant and honest about the matter (The foremost example of this, of course, is David Hume's devastating critique of causal reasoning in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding...) have openly conceded that they have no rational basis for believing that the future will resemble the past. We may have observed that event B followed event A many times in the past, but to know that B necessarily follows A (i.e., that the relation is causal), calls for reference to a metaphysical principle (namely, that the future will be like the past) [not to mention the metaphysical status of laws, how one can judge something to be a law of nature, what it even means for something to be a law of nature, and other really important issues in the philosophy of science]) for which the unbeliever has no warrant or right. As Bertrand Russell was driven to conclude: "The general principles of science, such as the belief in the reign of law, and the belief that every event must have a cause, are as completely dependent upon the inductive principle as are the beliefs of daily life. All such general principles are believed because mankind have found innumerable instances of their truth and no instances of their falsehood. But this affords no evidence for their truth in the future, unless the inductive principle is assumed." Assumed? But that is what was supposed to be proved! Russell was aware of his defeat: "Hence we can never use experience to prove the inductive principle without begging the question. Thus we must... forgo all justification of our expectations about the future." (Bertrand Russell, "On Induction," in The problems of Philosophy...).

Bahnsen goes on to point out that "The unbelieving worldview cannot provide a cogent reason for what we necessarily assume in all of our reasoning. Thus, it is entirely unreasonable not to believe in God."

Permalink | 53 Comments | Tags: Religion, Science | id 7063

00:19 (utc-5)

 

Huge whopping straw-man against presuppositionalism

Just noticed that someone linked to my post from last year on the problem of evil and cited one of my comments as part of a huge whopping straw-man argument against presuppositionalism/Christianity. (Looking back on that "problem of evil" post, I regret that I didn't get to respond to the last few comments.)

I wonder how he can write, from one sentence to the next, about Christians having both a "subjective (whim-based) [system of] morality" and a system of morality based on uthinkingly following commandments given by God. Or how he can write that "the Christian view is that man is intellectually impotent" while simultaneously acknowledging that Christians believe that "part of being made in the image of God is the ability to reason."

How he derived that "intellectually impotent" line from his out-of-context citation from my comment is beyond me as well.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Religion | id 6992

03:03 (utc-4)
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New Pope

Bill Hobbs: Meet the new Pope, via, via:

Eternal truth is eternal truth. If Pope Benedict XVI stands up for it, and stays committed to it, the world will be better off. The last thing the world needs is a post-modern pope who believes the church should change its teaching based on public opinion polls.

But, it looks like he's a hard liner for Church Tradition, so it's unlikely they'll reform their celibate priest situation. I think letting priests be married (heck, requiring them to be as the Bible's pretty clear about) would do a lot for the health of the Church. Of course, quitting all the idolatry and Mary worship would be good too, but that seems to be pretty central to Catholic practice.

Of course, as Bill points out, the Papal system itself is without Biblical warrant. Sigh.

Permalink | 1 Comment | Tags: Religion | id 6859

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