Well I am delighted to do a little video on the Christian Research Journal. It is a
magazine that I've said many times on the broadcast, the podcast, through our
digital media platforms - a magazine that no Christian home should be without.
You can subscribe in a safe, secure fashion on the web at Equip.org. The reason, though,
that I'm highlighting the Christian Research Journal is that the current
edition of the journal has an article in it that I was captivated by. The article
is titled "Street Epistemology: The New Atheist Evangelism." and this particular
article is very, very insightful. And I'm going to explain to you why. The first
thing I probably should tell you is what Street epistemology is. You know, it's
kind of a big title. Epistemology of course is the study of knowledge, and the
epistemological question is "How do you know?" And this is the very question that
atheist evangelists are asking theists and Christians, and that with a GoPro
video recorder in hand. In other words they're recording the answer of the
theist or the Christian. The idea is to capture the moment, then circulate the
video footage through social media platforms, and in doing so, they have the
stated goal of "eradicating the virus of faith." "It's a virus, it's a disease! Gotta
get rid of it! We've got to eradicate it," and this is one of the ways they think they
can do it. Well quite frankly, Street epistemology constitutes a service to
contemporary Christianity. Because as Travis Dickinson points out in the
Christian Research Journal, the lesson is that we need to take our faith seriously.
And instead it seems that Christians have increasingly become intellectually
lazy and apathetic about their faith. So we need to turn the tables here for a
moment, because it turns out that the atheist evangelists themselves are
virtually blind to the meaning of faith. Peter Boghossian,
one of the chief popularizers of Street Epistemology, goes so far as to mis-define
faith as - I think he puts it this way - "pretending to know things that you
don't know and having belief without evidence." Predictably what he blindly
parrots is people like Richard Dawkins who infamously define faith as "the great
excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence." Or I think Mark Twain
was a little more clever. He said, "faith is believing what you know ain't so." Well of
one thing we can be certain. Boghossian is dead wrong to suppose that
faith is belief without evidence. Quite obviously, faith is not belief without
evidence, but more accurately it is a state of trust grounded in reason and in
evidence. When Boghossian sits down in a chair,
or when he flies in an airplane, he does not do so absent reason, nor the basis of
blind faith. He does so on the basis of reason and empirical evidence. And that
is precisely the case for Christians. We do not believe what we know ain't so.
Rather we believe on the basis of common sense and rationality and evidence. The
atheist looks at something as seemingly simple as a feather, and
blindly believes that in the course of merely millions of years, that feather
emerged as a result of natural selection. The Christian looks at that same feather,
and does not have the temerity, the reckless boldness to take that great a
leap of faith. Why? Because as the science of statistical probability makes plain,
chance operating in concert with undirected processes could no more
produce a finch's feather that it could produce so much as one of its barbules.
In other words, the meticulous engineering of feathers, hardly squares,
with blind atheistic materialism, and that's just one example. But if you take
a closer look with respect to a feather, you're gonna notice that the central
shaft of a feather has a series of barbs projecting from each side at right
angles, then it has rows of smaller - well they're curled, I think, barbules that
protrude from both sides of the barbs, and then you have tiny hooks that
project downward from one side of the barbules and interlock with ridges on
the opposite side of the adjacent barbules. I don't want to get too far into the weeds but
let me simply add that there may be as many as a million barbules
cooperating to bind the barbs into a complete feather impervious to air
penetration. It's pretty incredible.
Moreover the positioning of the feathers is controlled by a complex network of
tendons that allow the feathers to open like the slats of a blind
when the wing is raised, and as a result, wind resistance is greatly
reduced on the upstroke, and on the downstroke the feathers close, providing
the necessary resistance for efficient flight. Well the point of all of this is
simply to say that atheist evangelists seeking to make Christians look foolish
foolishly contend that in the course of nearly millions of years, reptilian
scales become more and more like feathers until one day the perfect
feather emerged. And this on the basis of blind faith,
rather than reason. Plainly put, to attribute the intricacies of a mere
feather to unguided purposeless processes as to fly from knowledge to -
well, to anti-knowledge, a Christian could not so much as imagine doing such a
thing. Instead we trust, we put our faith in
what we have good reason to believe is true.
In the case of feathers we trust that design presupposes a designer.
Contrarily, the materialist manifests not only blind but bigoted faith. Despite
clear evidence of design, they exclude the possibility of a designer without so
much as taking a closer look. Well perhaps it is the theist who ought to
engage in Street Epistemology, and that with a GoPro video recorder in hand.
In the meantime, take a look at Travis Dickinson's article "Street Epistemology:
The New Atheist Evangelism" in CRI's award-winning magazine the Christian
Research Journal. It's an absolutely incredible article, and as I have talked
about many times when I talk about the journal, I mean the graphics that go
along with the article are stunning to say the least. We meld great content with
great visual production, so subscribe to the Christian Research Journal. You could
do that in a safe secure fashion on the web at Equip org.