Skeptic Forum #2: Can There be Just One True Religion?

The idea that Christianity, or even the biblical faiths, have a monopoly on religious truth is an outrageous and absurd religious chauvinism.

       // Rosemary Radford Ruether

 We believe that all religions are the basically the same. They all believe in love and goodness. They only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, God and salvation. We believe that each man must find the truth that is right for him and reality will adapt accordingly; the universe will readjust and history will alter. We believe that there is no absolute truth, except the truth that there is no absolute truth.

        // Steve Turner, English journalist “Modern Thinker's Creed” 

My position is that all great religions are fundamentally equal.

       // Mahatma Ghandi

 Response to Metaphysical Pluralism (Relativism)

1.   Inclusivism (Absolute Relativism) is a logical contradiction.

2.   The purpose of religion is to believe something because you believe it to be based on truth and reality.

3.   The world’s religions are fundamentally different.

4.   Different religious beliefs remain logically irreconcilable.

Within the discipline of Logic, The Principle of Contradiction (principium contradictionis in Latin) is that contradictory statements cannot both, at the same time, be true, e.g. the two propositions A is B and A is not B are mutually exclusive. If one is true, the other is not.

Christian civility does not commit us to a relativistic perspective. Being civil doesn’t mean that we cannot criticize what goes on around us. Civility doesn’t require us to approve of what other people believe and do. It is one thing to insist that other people have the right to express their basic convictions; it is another thing to say that they are right in doing so.

// Richard J. Mouw, Uncommon Decency

We must note the difference between equal toleration under the law and equal validity according to truth.

// R.C. Sproul

As soon as the notion of sameness moves beyond vague generalities—‘every religion has some version of the Golden Rule’—it founders on the fact that the religions differ in what hey consider essential and nonnegotiable.

// Huston Smith, Theologian

One who claims to be a skeptic of one set of beliefs is actually a true believer in another set of beliefs.

       // Phillip E. Johnson

I was once invited to be the Christian representative in a panel discussion with a Jewish rabbi and a Muslim imam…We all agreed on the statement: “If Christians are right about Jesus being God, the Muslims and Jews fail in a serious way to love God as God really is, but if Muslims and Jews are right that Jesus is not God but rather a teacher or prophet, then Christians fail in a serious way to love God as God really is.

// Tim Kellar, The Reasons for God

Any one who would become a pluralist must first abandon the very principles of logic that make all significant thought, action, and communication possible.

       // Ronald H. Nash, Philosopher

Religion is fundamentally about truth: trying to figure out what is real and how best to represent it.

       // John Stackhouse, Humble Apologetics

 John 14.6

Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Acts 4.12

“Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved."

Romans 10.9

That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

The Uniqueness of Christianity

1.  The Message (The Gospel & The Incarnation

Most other religions teach salvation by good works, but Christianity offers salvation by grace alone through faith. In other religions man is constantly seeking God, but in Christianity God is in search of man.

       // Steve Kumar

We cannot climb up to heaven to discover God, but God has come to earth, in the person of His Son, to reveal Himself to us in the only way we could really understand: in terms of a human life.

       // J.N.D. Anderson, Jesus Christ: The Witness of History

Skeptic Forum #1: Does God Exist?

#1 The Evidence of the Beginning of the Universe (The Cosmological Argument)

 Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

The universe began to exist. 

Therefore the universe had a cause.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, most scientists assumed a universe with no beginning and no end… The last seventy years have led to the very solid conclusion that the universe began at a single moment, commonly now referred to as the Big Bang. Calculations suggest it happened approximately 14 billion years ago.

// Francis Collins, The Language of God

It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.

//Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

The astrophysical evidence indicates that the universe began to exist in a great explosion called the big bang around fifteen billion years ago. Physical space and time were created in that event, as well as all the matter and energy in the universe.

       

//William Lane Craig, Philosopher and Historian

I never asserted so absurd a proposition as anything might arise without a cause.

 // David Hume, Philosopher and Skeptic

The Bible is unique among the documents of ancient history in positing an absolute beginning…Hinduism and Buddhism posit endless cycles of time stretching into the indefinite past. The Greeks and Romans believed in the eternity of history…Now modern science tells us the Bible is right. The universe was indeed formed out of nothing.

//Dinesh D’Souza, Philosopher

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S.U.R.G.E

Second law of Thermodynamics: The universe is running out of usable energy, thus it is not eternal—it had a beginning.

 Universe is Expanding: Edwin Hubble discovered the expanding universe and deduced that the universe had to have at some point in the past been together.

 Radiation from the Big Bang: Discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson won the Nobel Prize for discovering this afterglow from the Big Bang explosion—the heat can still be detected.

 Galaxy Seeds: the NASA satellite COBE discovered and measured the temperature ripples which enabled matter to congregate by gravitational attraction into galaxies in the background of the Big Bang radiation. A discovery Stephen Hawking called “the most important discovery of the century, if not of all time.”

 Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity: This theory (which is 99% verified) demands an absolute beginning for time, space, and matter. It shows that time, space and matter are co-relative, meaning they are interdependent—you can’t have one without the others.

_________________________________________________________

If there are moral laws that operate beyond the realm of natural laws, where do they come from? Moral laws presume a moral lawgiver. God is the ultimate standard of good.

//Dinesh D’Souza, Philosopher

#2 The Evidence of Ethics (The Axiological Argument)

If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.

Objective moral values do exist.

Therefore, God exists.

Here are the two things that hold me in awe: the starry hosts above, and the moral law within.

//Immanual Kant, Philosopher

Humanity knows of a Law or Rule of fair play or decent behavior about which they really agree…What is the sense in saying the enemy was wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazi’s at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced? There is a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table.

       //C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Romans 1.19-20: since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Romans 2.14-15: Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.

# 3 The Evidence from Intuition (The Argument from Intuition)

Men are intuitively religious.

They are so because God exists.

We are made in such a way as to be worshipfully inclined.

// Christopher Hitchens, Atheist

 The religious impulse, has always been a perennial feature of humanity.

// Peter Berger, Sociologist

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

// C.S. Lewis, Atheist turned Christian

If there is no God then all moral statements are arbitrary, all moral valuations are subjective and internal, and there can be no external moral standard by which a person's feelings and values are judged.

//Tim Kellar, The Reasons for God

 

 

Starting January 13 at DSF

"If there is no point in the story as a whole, there is no point in my own action. If the story is meaningless, any action of mine is meaningless…so the answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ can only be given if we ask ‘What is my story?’ and that can only be answered if there is an answer to the further question, ‘What is the whole story of which my story is a part? " -- Leslie Newbigin

"Nothing is more important than immersing yourself in the Story and allowing God to use it to change you so you can change others by helping them see their part in it." --Mark Clark

The series that we will be journeying through at deep.spirited.friends for the next 7 to 10 weeks, starting this Sunday (Sept. 30), is called theStory. We will be exploring the story that we find ourselves living out right now by reflecting on how God's story of his relationship with the world has unfolded in history. Come Join Us! The series will unfold in 5 episodes:

Episode I: Creation
Episode II: Crisis (the Fall)
Episode III: Calling (of Israel)
Episode IV: Christ
Episode V: Church
Episode VI: Consummation

Theology 101

Theology 101 is a three week series we are starting Sunday Sept. 9 at deep spirited friends (our Sunday evening community). We are exploring the foundational Christian teachings of the Church: The Bible, God, Hell, Salvation, Church and Government, Baptism, The Lord's Supper and other topics. Join us as we investigate Theology 101.

Q and A: Questions and Answers

Q and A is a series we are doing at DSF where we will be exploring questions asked by the community. People are encouraged to write and submit questions anytime during the church service and we will address them in the coming weeks.

Foolishness to the Greeks

Paul took the good news about Jesus to the city-centres of the ancient world because he knew that culture emanates from the urban world to the rest of society. This series examines the similiarities of ancient and modern forms of idolatry; examining the arrival of the gospel of Jesus into major pagan cultures of Paul's day. Athens (Acts 17), Ephesus (Acts 19), Colossae (Colossians), Corinth (1 Corinthians), Thessalonica (Acts 17) and Rome (Acts 26-28). By examining how the gospel critques religion, paganism, patriotism and oppressive economic structures we reflect on ways we can bring the good news of Jesus to our own world which is involved in many of the same forms of idolatry.