Apprentice Owl Apologetics

              I just became a new dad, and I have been working to re-establish my rhythm in my life while taking care of my baby girl. While looking at her one night, I was hit with an old argument that I have seen some thoughts about how humanity, and planet earth, are so insignificantly small with respect to the universe, that religion has to be false because it is human-centric. I wanted to take a minute and think about that size qualifier. Just because someone/something is small relative to something else, or the universe, does that make that someone/something unimportant? Absolutely not, and we can demonstrate this through anecdotal evidence and scientific evidence.               Anyone who has had a child of their own can tell you, and now I can, that having that baby just shifted almost all of your priorities lower down and placed that baby at the very top, just short of my relationship with God. They are incredibly small relative to their parents (especially to me with my

               Recently, the high profile Christian comedian John Crist came out and admitted to having inappropriate relationships with women. This included trading sexual favors for tickets, sexting fans, and other accusations. This is a tragic event, and I pray for peace and healing for all parties. These types of events lead to a couple of responses, with people distancing themselves from John, people condemning him, and some coming to John’s side to show that he has apologized and that he deserves forgiveness. My question to pose and think about today is this, what should we do when high profile Christians mess up?               We could take this question in a couple of directions, and consider two different groups of people. The first being church officials, such as youth ministers, your pastor, all the way to the pope (if you are a Catholic). What do we do when they make mistakes and hurt the people they are supposed to be ministering to? First off, we need to make sure tha

               Two men that I knew in high school have passed away this year. One had a tragic motorcycle accident, and the other one lost a hard fight against leukemia. Being in our late 20’s, I’m sure neither person was expecting to lose their life, and it’s possible that they did not consider what happens after they are gone in terms of the possibility of an afterlife. Since we went to high school in small town Texas, one could assume both men were Christians (and commit the genetic fallacy while we were at it), but that is beside the point of this post. Some of you may have put off the questions of what happens after we die, thinking that religion is for the old or that you will get to it tomorrow. The reality is that no one is guaranteed tomorrow, and that we should have our house in order asap. Have you considered the possibility of the existence of God and an afterlife? Have you considered the evidence for God? You may have heard of Pascal’s wager, in which we describe the

                 This post is a response to a classic meme that we have all probably seen. We have seen the posts from popular atheist and anti-Christian forums that post this meme that goes something like this “There have been thousands of gods throughout human civilization, but don’t worry, only yours is the real one.” At first glance, this statement may hold some water, but when we take a look closer, we see that they are throwing out the baby with the bath water, so to speak. The meme tries to discredit Christianity because there are so many false religions out there. Really what they should be asking is, “how can Christianity claim to be true when other religions claim they have the exclusive truth?” What I want to do is to take a look at these questions and show how we can know that not only Christianity is true, but how we can see how other worldviews fail under the same criteria.                 Many religions are exclusive in their claims to truth, this fact itself refutes

                   I wanted to do a short little essay on why I think the Bible is not a science textbook, and why I think that is ok. We have plenty of sciences being studied that do not stir up much controversy among the religious communities, but we do have this supposed showdown over scripture vs evolution. The Bible was written not to communicate the mechanisms behind the operation of life and the universe, but to talk about the divine inspiration of humanity, the nature of our fallen state as humans separated by God, the wonderful love and mercy that God has on us by sacrificing his only son to restore the God-human relationship, and the ultimate destiny of mankind should they choose the gift of salvation offered by Jesus or reject it.               Now, I do hold my doctorate in Chemistry, and I teach university courses in Chemistry and I advocate that science and faith are not mutually exclusive. Just because I think that the Bible is not the place to learn science does not

               Another one of the more relevant objections to Christianity is the apparent sexism that we read into scripture, particularly the Old Testament. I have written a handful of previous posts discussing how Christianity is unique in the treatment of women, particularly how women are treated with respect in contrast with the ancient world around the tribes of Israel and the cultures in which Christianity was born. We see scripture filled with stories that prominently feature women and show that God will pour out his grace and love on all of his creations equally (Ruth and Naomi, Mary and Elizabeth, Rahab, the women leaders in the early church mentioned in Acts, I could go on but I want to get to the specifics of this post.) What I want to do is to take a look at the supposed scriptures that people reference in regard to women, typically in regards to sexual assault and marriage, though the women counting as half a testimony also comes to mind. Let’s take a look at some of th

             From recent discussions with family, I have a few questions that I will be writing on to try and give answers to the questions that were brought up. One of the first questions that I had on my list was in regard to the multitude of Biblical translations from Hebrew/Greek into English. The question basically set up as follows, we have multiple translations, such as the KJV, NIV, NLT, etc. that have variations in how the scripture is read. Why should we bother with scripture because we have these imperfect copies? What I want to do here is talk about why we have different translations, and show how that even though we have variations in our English Bibles, that the core message of each scripture is not lost, and that many complaints against Biblical inerrancy are resolved if we use proper cultural understanding, supplemented with looking at the original Hebrew and Greek wording. Fair warning, I am no linguist, so I will be relying on my research, so I will be posting sourc

               I am on summer vacation from teaching, and I was enjoying some time off, but I find myself reminiscing in this free time and realizing that apologetics has been a hobby of mine and a ministry that I feel called to for over 6 years now. I wanted to write a little opinion piece over some of the apologists that I started studying when I was younger, who I found more influential, and comment on some of the “newer” apologists that I have found on the way, When I say “newer” I mean that I stumbled across these apologists after I had started my own ministry, and even though I may quote them, they were not part of my original apologetics study. No disrespect to those on that list, I love all the people on this list and beyond.               For my first few apologists that I learned from, I have to mention Lee Strobel. His “Case for” series of books are awesome works to introduce people to a litany of apologetic topics that are relevant for many of our students today. I know

               I have been following the apologetics community on social media, and I have seen that channels like Capturing Christianity have been having discussions on Intelligent Design, and some detractors have been bringing up the “puddle problem” objection to intelligent design. I’m sure there are plenty of people who will be writing responses to this themselves, but I wanted to add my own two cents to the problem.               The puddle problem is a response to the Teleological Fine Tuning Argument for the existence of God. It says that humans are merely products (puddles) of the natural forces of the universe around us (the hole we find ourselves in). It is presented as an alternative to the claim that the universe is fine tuned for life by an outside mind. I may be misrepresenting, but it seems to me like the puddle problem totally misrepresents the Teleological argument. I think it totally disregards the evidence that leads us to the Fine Tuning Argument.             

                 I really didn’t want to get political so soon after I said was taking a break from this topic, and I really didn’t want a high profile topic like abortion, but God has a sense of humor like this, and I feel I must put in my two cents. Maybe it’s because I have plenty of pro-choice friends on social media blasting their pride in abortions (or the fact that people should be able to choose to kill their fetus) and even so-called conservative pages condemning Alabama and Georgia in their new laws being passed (and Missouri for considering it). Some of these people fought past issues with fertility to have the children they have in their arms today, so the apparent hypocrisy that I see infuriates me as well as breaks my heart. I wanted to give my thoughts on abortion, look at scripture to see if God values the unborn, and what I think the United States government should be doing about it. I don’t want to bash anyone, but I did want to give my thoughts as to the current ev

                 Eye-catching title aside, I wanted to write this as a sort of blanket response to critics of Christianity who like to nitpick certain aspects of scripture, such as slavery, polygamy, violence, and the like. The Bible is a collection of books, and these books are from multiple genres, such as history, poetry, ethics, songs, and so on. Focusing specifically on history, the Bible covers the history of the people of Israel, and other parties, necessary to understand the scope of God’s plan for humanity and the need for a savior. This history includes it all, and doesn’t white wash any of the players involved, showing their triumphs and failures. This is just the nature of a good historical narrative, and it doesn’t mean that we should do everything that the heroes of scripture that we learn about in Sunday school should do.                 For example, let’s take a look at David, the king that was described as being the man after God’s own heart. You would think a gre

On March 21, 2019, the UK Immigration Department rejected an asylum seeker, citing verses from Leviticus, Exodus, and Revelation to state that Christianity was not a peaceful religion. What I want to do today is to take a look at the Immigration Department’s claim about Christianity and see if what they have quoted is just cherry picked. So in a sweeping statement, Exodus and Leviticus were written as part of the Old Testament, and a little over 1000 years before Christianity came about, as part of the Old Covenant, which was fulfilled through Christ. The Old Covenant is also tied to the land that God wanted for the nation of Israel. It did involve God commanding Israel to drive out nations before them, but it was also God’s judgment on those other nations for their wicked deeds, such as child sacrifice. If anything these verses show a temporary command of violence for Judaism, but it was just that, temporary. Even here we digress, because we are talking about the “violence” of Chr

               So we have covered the objections to the resurrection of Jesus, objections to the historicity of Jesus, and now we get to one of the most popular objections to Christianity. The objection goes something like this, the scribes for the Bible have made small mistakes over time, so there is no possible way that the Bibles we have today are the same as the scriptures that were originally written. What I would like to do today is present the evidence for the case that our scriptures that we have today in our bookstores/Christian supply stores are 99.999% identical to the earliest manuscripts that we have recovered from archaeological sites.               First, we should consider all of the ancient copies of scriptures that we have recovered and their dates. The events of the new testament are thought to have been originally written down between A.D. 50-100. We have portions of copies of these documents dated to around A.D. 100-150. We also have plenty of complete copies o

               To continue with my introductory apologetics series, I wanted to take a step back from the scriptures and Jesus and look at a matter of history. There is a staunch crowd that one can find on the internet that will claim that Christians are crazy for believing in Jesus because Jesus never existed at all. That Jesus is merely a myth like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Is this the case? Have roughly a third of the world deluded ourselves into believing in a myth? I think we will find that historical records, including those outside of the Bible, will side with the Christian. There is a secondary issue, or separate issue entirely depending on who you are talking to, that Jesus did exist, but he wasn’t the son of God, and that the council of Nicea was responsible for the deification of Jesus. What I want to do today is take a brief look at the extra biblical sources for the existence of Jesus and the writings of church fathers to show that not only did Jesus exist, but tha

               I have been feeling recently that I needed to get back to basics for apologetics, as my original intent of this blog was to communicate what I have learned as I studied apologetics. I don’t discount my more recent work, but I may have been getting into a rut of writing opinion pieces about current events and politics. I may still contribute a post or two in 2019, but my main goal for the next few months is to write a series that looks at the topics that I think should be “basic training” for up and coming apologists. The first question that I want to look at are objections to the resurrection of Jesus, since that is the cornerstone of our faith (1 Corinthians 15:14).               What I mean by objections to the resurrection, are people who look at the scriptures and think that there are glaring wholes in the gospels that exclude the idea of the resurrection. This will be close to something that you may have seen from the likes of J. Warner Wallace or Lee Strobel.

               In one of my previous posts, I had talked about the Old Testament indirectly showing that we as Americans should work to maintain as small a government as possible, as wanting a more worldly government was part of the Israelites’ downfall into the cycle of trouble and redemption with God. When I posted this, some acquaintances on social media mentioned Romans 13:1-7 and posed a question to me, as in the title of this post. Does the governing authority bear the mark of God as he has established the governing authorities? I think the answer depends on a case by case scenario, as I plan to demonstrate.               I do agree with the inerrancy of scripture, and Romans 13:1-7 does ordain us to submit to the governing authorities, I don’t agree with some interpretations that say that we should let the governing powers not be held in check by the people, or to let them discourage free worship of God. It’s not just that I am an American, we have many examples of the faith