Most Americans have probably never heard of Elizabeth Willing Powel. But she was a prominent socialite and political hostess in pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia. Her husband was the first mayor of that city after the Revolution. But she is more famous because she hosted political discussions for many of the leading figures of the American founding in her home. One of them was Benjamin Franklin.

When the Constitutional Convention ended, she asked him the question everyone was asking: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

Old Ben is said to have replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Franklin did not say this pessimistically. He wasn’t that kind of guy. Instead, he was pragmatically cautious. He was a realist. He knew that the form of government he and the other Founders had just put in place required an engaged and conscientious public.

John Adams made the same point more adamantly a few years later. In his October 11, 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia, Adams wrote:

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A Christian Nation?

Before I make my point, I want to be clear about what I’m not saying.

It’s common for people to get into arguments about whether America is — or ever was — a “Christian Nation.” The problem with that is knowing what one means when they use the phrase.

If you mean that America can only be run and inhabited by Christians, that is clearly not the case. America is not a theocracy. It’s the opposite. The Founders made that point clear in the Bill of Rights’ First Amendment when they said: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

You can’t say America is “Christian” if you mean Christianity is the “established religion” of the land.

The point of the First Amendment was to specifically say you cannot do that. Ironically, America was the first nation to openly demand that everyone is free to exercise whatever religion they want to practice. It’s one of the main reasons for its success and America’s reputation as the greatest source of liberty in world history.

On the other hand, it’s ridiculous to assert that America wasn’t founded on Christian principles. When someone uses the term “Founding Fathers,” they’re usually referring to the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Of those, 28 were Episcopalians, 8 were Presbyterians, 7 were Congregationalists, 2 were Lutherans, 2 were Dutch Reformed, 2 were Methodists, 2 were Roman Catholics, 1 was unknown, and 3 were deists (Williamson, Wilson, and Franklin). This is at a time when church membership required a public confession of biblical faith.¹

But if you take the “Founding Fathers” to consist of the 204 men who were not only delegates to the Constitutional Convention, but who also signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, 195 of them were Christians — 95%.

And don’t dismiss Ben Franklin just because he was a deist. He was not the kind of deist we’re used to hearing today. During the Constitutional Convention, James Madison offered the following quote from Franklin regarding God and his role in the American founding:

Without going into any more depth, it is perfectly correct to say that America was founded directly on the Christian principles that all human beings are made in the image of God, that all human beings are also sinful, and that our form of government accounts for both. It’s why we have checks and balances.

This is not debatable. It’s spelled out clearly in the Declaration of Independence, and reinforced by everything the Founders said and did.

The question I want to explore is more existential and modern. It’s a question that follows from Ben Franklin’s cautious statement.

Can we keep it?

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Hysterical or Historical?

If you’re anything like me, asking the question, “Can we keep it?” may sound a little hysterical. But it is sobering to consider another applicable example from history. Historian Edward Watts did just that in his book, The Final Pagan Generation.

Let me fill in the blanks for you. They are, in order: “Romans,” “Romans,” “Roman,” and “Christian.”

Don’t miss the irony. Citizens of the Roman Empire in the early 400s AD could never have imagined that the pagan world they had grown used to would ever be replaced by a culture in which Christianity was dominant.

The Roman Empire fell in 476 AD. The Roman citizenry who watched it fall could never have known that Christianity would be responsible for transforming the modern world forever.²

Hard Questions

We are celebrating the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. But in 1974, two years before our 200th anniversary, Archbishop Fulton Sheen declared that “we are at the end of Christendom — the economic, political, and social life inspired by Christian principles … is ending. We have seen it die.”

Fifty-two years later, America is still here. Was Sheen wrong? More pointedly, was John Adams right? Can America as we’ve known it survive if what Sheen said is true?

Are we still a “moral and religious people”?

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An Honest Assessment

Here is some data to consider before you answer that question.

According to Barna Research³ …

• Less than 6% of Americans have and live out a biblical worldview. Inside the church, it’s less than 9%. As an aside, only 37% of Christian pastors have a biblical worldview.⁴

• 60% of parents embrace many of the ideals found in Nihilism, Marxism, Postmodernism, and Secular Humanism — all of which dismiss the existence of God.

• In the 1990s, 73% of Americans “… believed that one or more gods, spiritual deities, supreme beings, higher powers, or supernatural authorities existed.” 75% of those identified the God of the Bible as one of those entities.” Today, that 73% has dropped to 40% … a minority of American adults.

• 65% of Americans believe that there is no objective moral truth. They see morality as being personal and subjective.

• Only 23% of non-Christians believe human life is sacred. Among born-again Christians, only a slightly higher 35% do.

At the risk of overkill, I’ll stop there. But if the question is, “Are we a religious and moral people,” what would your answer be?

Is it any wonder we have skyrocketing rates of: abortion, sexual assault, marital infidelity, divorce, children without two parents, drug addiction, suicide, anxiety, deviant sexuality, or political apathy and corruption? Does our political discourse lead you to believe our “leaders” are serious about addressing any of it?

Does the combination of these seem like a good formula for “keeping a Republic” that is contingent on the behaviors of a “moral and religious people”?

A Cut Flower Culture

Many find these statistics hard to believe. They look out at the world around them and may either think that everything seems fine, or that it’s not as bad as some of us make it out to be. Sure, there are problems, but hasn’t the internet and our 24-hour news cycle culture just made us more aware of them?

I don’t think so. The statistics I mentioned may be off, but the trends in those statistics are what I find most troubling. None of them are heading in the right direction.

Not one.

Remember the early 4th century Romans. It seemed to them that their pagan world would never change. Fifty years later, Christianity left Roman paganism in the dustbin of history.

Os Guinness has compared a culture like ours to cut flowers in a vase. They’re pretty to look at. Their colors are vivid. But it’s only a matter of time before they’re wilted and black. The flowers are separated from their source of life.

They’re already dead. They just don’t know it yet.

And make no mistake, the data shows that the Republic our Founders gave us to keep is being increasingly severed from the source that made it flourish.

We are doing Rome in reverse — comfortable in a Christian-based culture that is being replaced by a new form of paganism right before our eyes. But let’s not make the same mistake they did — of assuming our society will survive just because it has so far. When our culture throws away the foundations on which human equality and dignity are based, the wilted, black flowers won’t be far behind.

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No Time for Capitulation

Acknowledging these facts is not a license to surrender. Christianity has been oppressed and undermined since its inception. Ask the Apostles and the early members of The Way in Jerusalem how bright their future looked while they were being persecuted.

But they didn’t cave to the culture, and neither should we.

We aren’t here to give up, nor are we here to just exist and survive. We are called to engage the world around us. How we do that is up to us. But there shouldn’t be any debate about the fact that we have the obligation.

That obligation does not depend on any political party, judge, president, or election. But to say politics doesn’t matter is to bury your head in the sand.

Politics affects policy. Policy affects people. We care about people.

Do the math. If we care about people, we have to care about politics. But maybe not in the ways our culture and social media have trained us to care — by picking teams and fighting with the other side.

There are other ways to do this. Effective ways. Biblical ways.

Re-Planting Flowers

Our obligation to act is the only thing that will stop the decline we’re living through. If the Founders are right and we want to keep the Republic they gave us, we need to lead the way back to becoming a “moral and religious people.” That obligation is nothing new. Christians refer to it as our “calling.”

If we really believe we are God’s image bearers to the world, the calling I’m talking about is far different from what it has become in modern Christian-speak. Somehow, we’ve accepted the idea that only a chosen few are “called.” We wrongly refer to them as folks who are in “full-time ministry.” They’re the ones whom God has given some specific enterprise to engage the world.

Since that’s not us, we’re just here to cheer the “called” people on, fund their work, and observe from the sidelines. We’re content to be cheerleaders and never get in the game ourselves.

That’s not biblical. And I would like to submit that this mindset is a huge reason we’re in this mess. It’s most certainly not what I mean by being “called.”

The calling I’m talking about is a universal obligation that every Christian has because, guess what?

You are one of God’s ambassadors to the world. And you have been called in four different ways.⁵

TO CELEBRATE AND PROTECT GOOD THINGS

The good, the true, and the beautiful are all objective evidence of the character of the Creator. Our cut flower culture has relativized all three. But there are practical ways to celebrate goodness in the world:

• Celebrate lifelong married love in a culture in which it’s rare.

• Acknowledge and teach the next generation about God’s good design of male and female.

• Pursue work done well and for the sake of others.

• Honor, promote, and protect a view of liberty that is not based in our own personal freedom, but in a biblical form of freedom grounded in God’s moral law.

• Care for God’s world in a way that helps it flourish.

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. ~ Philippians 4:8

TO CREATE AND CONTRIBUTE TO THINGS THAT ARE MISSING

God made us to be stewards of this earth. We have been gifted in different ways to think about, imagine, innovate, and improve the world around us. We can contribute by:

• Creating beauty in art, music, dance, literature, and architecture.

• Telling someone who doesn’t know Jesus about him.

• Starting a business to produce good things and provide gainful employment for others.

• Planting a church in a community where there is none.

• Imagining and producing stories that tell the truth about the world.

• Opening a small school or providing quality educational options for parents.

• Offering forgiveness in situations filled with bitterness and hurt.

TO RESIST AND OPPOSE EVIL IN THE WORLD

God perfect goodness does not allow him to tolerate evil. So, if he opposes all that is evil, so should we. Looking at the world around us, we see the consequences of evil everywhere. We can oppose it many ways by:

• Preventing pornography use in our own homes and families and demanding online providers do the same.

• Speaking out against the mistreatment of anyone.

• Clarifying that a particular cause or action is sinful, even if it’s culture says it’s acceptable or celebrated.

• Learning about, praying for, and sending aid to persecuted Christians around the world.

• Speaking out or voting against proposed laws that target children for harm.

But as he who has called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” ~ 1 Peter 1:15-16

TO RENEW AND RESTORE THINGS THAT ARE BROKEN

Throughout history, the church has been known for its care of the sick, the weak, the outcast, and those in prison. This began with the first Christians and has continued ever since. It’s the defining feature of the Christian life, not a random exception to it.

We are not called to a private faith that stays contained within the church walls on Sunday mornings. Christ is our model for how to live in this world as God intends. Renewing and restoring broken things is how we reflect him. And that can involve:

• Medical researchers working toward therapies and medications that heal, but only within ethical, biblical boundaries.

• Helping women in unexpected pregnancies embrace their pre-born children and reconciling them with their families.

• Bringing the gospel to inmates and their families as they deal with the effects of incarceration.

• Sharing how lives broken by sin can be restored by God with people who may never have heard such a message.

• Walking with young people who believe lies about their bodies and identities to help them reconcile with who God created them to be.

The Only Way to Keep It

All of us can add to these lists. None of them are ground-breaking. And suggesting them is not wishful thinking or naive. They are simply the kinds of things a moral and religious people do. If they seem unrealistic, it’s only because we as a society have abandoned them for so long we’ve forgotten what it looks like to live out our corporate calling.

Just imagine how drastically our politics and our culture would look if every Christian committed themselves to follow that kind of calling. Imagine further what could happen to our culture if you could convince two or three people who are currently disengaged to join you.

On second thought, stop imagining it. Make a pledge to do something about it.

The independence we celebrate commemorates the vision of our Founders and their refusal to remain under the thumb of an authoritative British government. Remembering is good.

But it’s not enough.

The nation those Founders built was grounded in the character and goodness of the God of the Bible. But we will only keep it that way if we change the way we approach the future and live up to our calling — if we reconstitute ourselves as a “moral and religious people.”

Enjoy the 250th anniversary of our independence. But don’t stop there. Keeping a Republic is not a job for the faint of heart.

We have work to do.

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NOTES

¹ John Eidsmoe, Christianity and the Constitution, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987), p. 43.

² I owe several of the points given here to: John David Davidson, “America After Christianity,” Touchstone, May/June 2025, p. 34.

³ Barna Research, American Worldview Inventory 2025.

⁴ Barna Research, American Worldview Inventory 2022-2023, Chapter 5.

⁵ What follows is based directly on the Colson Center project, Truth Rising. It’s an outstanding 4-lesson group study that you can access for free at: https://www.truthrising.com/

Carl Trueman is a wonderful thinker who has been diligent over the last few years in helping Christians understand how our culture has gotten so woefully out of joint. His book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, was a phenomenal analysis of the historical roots of human thought that led to the astounding transformation we’ve witnessed in our culture over the last thirty years. If you don’t have time to read Trueman’s masterpiece, he also offered a condensed version of the material in his book, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution. And if you’re just looking for Reader’s Digest version, I did my best to summarize his points in an article titled, “From Sense to Cellar” a few years ago in Salvo magazine.

Trueman’s newest book, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity, is a fantastic follow-on to the themes he explored in his earlier work. And this time, he brings some practical solutions to Christians who want to do something about it but feel overwhelmed by the spirit of the age.

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Slow, Then Fast

One point Trueman makes about these topics is that the changes we see occurring all around us, especially in the area of human sexuality, didn’t come out of nowhere. They’ve been happening slowly for centuries. We just happen to be living at the time when things have started accelerating.

It’s like letting out an anchor on a rope. At first, it’s easy to let it out slowly. But as the anchor drops, the combined weight of the rope and anchor make it drop faster. It’s harder to stop. Then, at some point, it’s impossible. The rope slides through your hands so quickly you lose control.

That’s where our culture is now.

The Anchor Begins to Fall

The anchor we’re talking about is a corrupted cultural understanding of what makes us human — and what makes humans valuable. Centuries ago, the world’s greatest thinkers understood human nature as a reflection of the Divine Essence. They called it being “made in the image of God.”

Men like St. Augustine of Hippo wrote about that idea back in the 4th century. Augustine saw himself as a poor reflection of that image — naturally wicked in comparison to his Maker.

In other words, the traditional view was that human nature should be measured with reference to a transcendent, objective good — the nature of God himself. This way of thinking led to what we now know as Western Civilization — the establishment of human rights and dignity, liberty and freedom, and the rule of law.

By the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had turned that model upside down. To Rousseau, “natural man” was essentially good. It was society’s external forces that had corrupted him. As Carl Trueman puts it, Rousseau believed that:

Society and its conventions are the enemy, suppressing desire and perverting the individual in a way that prevents the real, authentic self from being able to express itself.¹

Of course, the enemy Rousseau attacked was a Judeo-Christian understanding of the world. If that was what was suppressing individuals from freely expressing themselves, that society — and those conventions — were in the way.

It all needed to be undone.

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The Fall Accelerates

Sigmund Freud and his perverted pseudo-science helped put Rousseau’s project of undoing how we understand human nature to work. Where Rousseau attacked institutions like traditional marriage because they represented the oppressive societal norms that had corrupted “natural man,” Freud just took it one step further.

He put sex and sexual expression at the center of human existence, and used “science” as the authoritative hammer to make his point.² He succeeded in selling the myth that sexual desire and fulfillment are the keys to what it means to be human.

Then, in the 20th century, the academic intelligentsia used Marxist ideology to label common cultural understandings of the sex and family as “oppressive forces” that controlled the world through patriarchal traditions.

And that meant targeting for destruction the infantile religious dogma on which that tradition rested.

The Desecration of Man Yields Polytheism

Rousseau psychologized the self and succeeded in selling the idea that man was basically good. Freud made psychology purely sexual. Applying Marxist ideology to all of it made sexuality political.

It took a couple centuries for those steps to play out. But once the stage had been set in the culture’s collective mind, the anchor started to free-fall. This is the only way to explain the things we see going on today that seem to be happening so rapidly.

Once the people in our contemporary culture were convinced that their individual identity was not based on a common, shared value in the Imago Dei, but rather on whatever each individual decides they want it to be, the acceleration couldn’t be stopped.

Human beings took something sacred — the Imago Dei grounded in an omniscient, monotheistic God — discarded it, and declared themselves to be the only arbiters of their own value and purpose.

It’s a new form of polytheism. We have created a multitude of gods, each one made in his/her own image. Sexuality has become the most visible representation of this humanity-destroying phenomenon.

Commodifying Sex

This is what Carl Trueman refers to as the Desecration of Man — destroying the ancient, sacred sexual codes and replacing them with personal pleasure and fulfillment. It’s the new-found path to “liberation” that leads to the perversion and commodification of what God meant to be sacred. We’ve repudiated the idea of human exceptionalism, objectified human persons, and fancied ourselves as “self-creators.”³

God designed sexuality as a sacred bond between husband and wife that cements the relationship and is the method by which we obey His exhortation to “go forth and multiply.” The pleasurable aspect of sex was meant to fortify the relationship, not define it.

But since “we’re all gods now,” sex has simply become a servant of our personal desires. We can manipulate it using science and technology. To paraphrase legal scholar Adeline Allen:

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Re-Consecration

Thinking Christians sense all of this happening, of course. And though few of us could explain how we got here as well as Carl Trueman, we know something ain’t right. But what can we do about it? How do we kick against the cultural, human-desecrating goads?

Trueman closes his book with recommendations about what it means to re-consecrate humanity that are clear and compelling. But let me simplify it for you.

Think and act Christianly.

Take the Bible seriously enough to know and be honest about what it says … about everything. Disregard what the culture wants it to say.

Doing the latter is what got us in this desecrated mess. A consecrated point of view is the opposite of that.

The project of reclaiming and defending the set of beliefs that define the faith — what C.S. Lewis called, “Mere Christianity” — starts with knowing the ancient creeds many of us used to recite from memory. Those creeds were not just poetic expressions, they were objective truth claims about what defines Christianity. They were built to do exactly what Jude said so succinctly:

“Contend for the faith that was once and for all delivered to the saints.”¹¹

We must do that, but not only that.

When it comes to the polytheistic, me-centered world we’ve forged, serious Christians need to focus on how they can turn things around. We need a God-centered view of the world. Humbly acknowledging that God is God — and we are not — is what it’s all about. We have a word for that.

It’s called worship.

Pay attention to the “worship” songs your church is singing. If you hear the words “me” and “I” more frequently than “God,” or “You,” you might be inadvertently caught up in the polytheistic, desecrated morass we’ve been talking about.

And remember, real worship is not just about singing songs. It’s a way of life. All of us need to find ways to think about God — in every situation — more than we think about ourselves.

Know the Bible ... Worship God, not yourself ... Live accordingly.

Shockingly complicated, isn’t it?

A World That’s Right Side Up

The desecration of man happened slowly — until it didn’t. We’re living at a time when the anchor is free-falling. But try to imagine how much different this world could be if all of us just honored and respected every human being as the image-bearing creature they are. If everyone just ordered their lives and families with God at the center instead of their sexual desires?

Relationships would improve. Priorities would change. Society would function the way it was designed.

All we have to do is make human life sacred again — from conception to natural death.

I’m not naive. I know a great majority in our culture have let the rope slip too quickly from their grasp, and find the whole show entertaining. They don’t give any of this a second thought. They will laugh and think they’re exercising their “freedom” as they watch the anchor plunge into the abyss.

But we’re supposed to be different.

The anchor is falling fast. But if enough of us put on some gloves on and grab the rope, we may be able to stop it.

Our kids and grandkids are in the boat with us … and they are watching.

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Notes

1. Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Crossway, 2020), 129.

2. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph, 202–204.

3. Carl R. Trueman, The Desecration of Man (Sentinel, 2026), 20.

4. Trueman, Desecration, 136.

5. Jude 3.

According to the fabulous new worldview resource created by the Colson Center and Focus on the Family titled, “Truth Rising”:

Katy Faust was a pastor’s wife living what she calls the safe and comfortable Christian life. Seeking a deeper faith and purpose, God called Katy to become a voice for the most vulnerable members of our society. That’s when Katy became an advocate for the rights of children.

With no formal training and no clue where it would lead, she launched what has come to be a ministry known as “Them Before Us.” Them Before Us operates on the simple but profound principle that when we think about issues that affect the family — topics like marriage, abortion, adoption, foster care, or fertility — we should always be focused on what best benefits children.

The idea seems simple and obvious … until you stop to think about how our culture actually approaches these kinds of issues. Marriage is all about making ourselves “happy.” Abortion is usually a way to escape past poor choices and avoid future responsibilities. And when it comes to decisions about bringing children into our lives, the focus is sometimes a thinly-veiled attempt to fulfill our own hopes and dreams.

No issue highlights that tendency more than what has become a gigantic money-making machine that plays right into that understandable motivation. They call it: In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF).

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Touchy Subject

I hesitated to type the preceding paragraph because I know how painful infertility can be. I also know that most people who engage in IVF do so for very “pro-life” reasons. They long for a family that seems illusive. While the abortion industry exists solely to seek and destroy new human life, the IVF industry does the opposite. Its motivation is to perpetuate life. All of that is completely understandable.

But the reality of IVF and the industry it has spawned is another story. And Katy Faust is one of the prominent voices who address these issues in a new film that aims to do us all a favor by helping us “navigate the moral complexities of IVF.”

It’s titled, “Frozen Orphans.”

This is not your run-of-the-mill “Christian” movie filled with cringy commentary and second-rate acting. It is a documentary created by industry professionals who have a passion for delivering God’s truths on film. In it, you will hear heartfelt facts about the commodification of children, the ethical dilemmas created by IVF, and the sad fate that awaits more than 2 million embryos — tiny human beings — who wallow in a state of suspended, cryogenic animation.

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Educate to Motivate

I share this on behalf of a dear friend’s daughter, who writes the following about this project:

Please take a few minutes to look this over. Educate yourself about the stark realities of IVF. And consider whether you, or someone you know, may be able to help these filmmakers make a positive impact for life.

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There is plenty of scientific evidence for God’s existence. From Big Bang Cosmology, to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, to the inescapable implications of the origin and design of life itself. Each of these point us to the same conclusion — that God’s existence is a reasonable inference as the cause of it all.

That said, there is always a liability that comes with using scientific arguments like these to ground our case. Scientific conclusions can change. Fortunately, science isn’t all we have. There are also philosophical arguments for theism.

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As soon as you say the word “philosophy,” many Christians recoil in horror. There are two reasons for this reaction. First, philosophy seems to be a ridiculous practice of talking about esoteric things that don’t have anything to do with the real world. I get that. I used to think that myself. But realize that philosophy is just two Greek words crammed together: phileo (the friendly form of love) + sophia (wisdom).

So, philosophy is nothing but the “love of wisdom.” And I think we can agree, we all need more of that. It’s certainly nothing to be afraid of.

Second, we’ve been led to believe that engaging in philosophy is anti-biblical — a “worldly” kind of thing we should avoid. There are even scriptural warnings against it!

But please read those scriptural warnings more carefully. The admonitions are not against philosophy itself. They are against bad philosophy. That’s what you’re supposed to avoid. When you do, you find that philosophy is a method of seeking truths about the world. And if we believe Christianity is true, that means philosophy will be on our side. So, let’s use it.

I’m no philosopher, but let me present a couple of compelling examples of how we can do just that.

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A World in Motion

When you and I talk about “motion,” we think about physical things like baseballs transitioning from one point in physical space to another. But when philosophers talk about motion they mean something very different. Motion to a philosopher means change. This idea of motion includes objects like baseballs moving through space. But it also includes phenomena like leaves changing color and falling off trees, the water cycle, or the growth of even the simplest organism.

To a philosopher, motion includes the processes of life and everything else about the world around us. Our bodies form, grow, get old, and then die and decay. Things are constantly changing, so the world we observe is constantly “in motion.”

Actual and Potential

Philosophers describe this ongoing process by saying that things are always “actually” in some state but have the “potential” to move to another state.

Think of an ice cube. It is an “actual” block of frozen water but it has the “potential” to become a puddle, then steam, vapor, a cloud, a raindrop, part of a river that flows into a lake, and then something you pour in your glass … or put back in your freezer. There is a continuous chain of events during which actual things (with potential) change into other actual things.

Each step in the ongoing process of change must have a cause that drives it. Something makes the motion continue. Or, to put it another way, whatever goes from potential to actual must have a cause.

The motion always begins with something actual.

The Unmoved Mover

If we trace the chain of events back far enough, we find that the motion has to have started with something that not only did not move, but was unmovable. Aristotle called this the “Unmoved Mover.” He described it as “pure actuality” — something that never moved from potential to actual because it was the original, actual thing.

This thing did not require a cause because it was the First Cause of all the motion.

“And this,” Thomas Aquinas famously said, “is what we call God.”

This is a powerful argument for God’s existence. It leads us to a conclusion that may sound very familiar. That’s because the argument for an Unmoved Mover sounds an awfully lot like the inference we get from the Cosmological Argument that “beginnings need beginners.”

These arguments are linear and temporal. They are built on the idea that a chain of causation cannot go on forever. It has to have started somewhere.

But, wait. There’s more!

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A God Who Sustains Existence

There is an even more powerful version of this argument that does not depend on when things began to exist. Instead, it offers proof that God exists based solely on the reality we experience in the present moment. This argument is not linear, but hierarchical. As philosopher Ed Feser explains:

... a hierarchical series is best introduced by thinking in terms of a sequence whose members exist at a single moment of time ... so when it is said that such a series must have a first member, the claim is not that the series has to be traced back to some beginning point in the past. Rather, the series could not exist in the first place unless there was something that did have the power to hold up intermediaries without having to be held up itself.

~ Ed Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (p. 23)

Back to our ice cube. It sits inside a glass, but the glass sits on a table, and the table on the floor, and the floor on a building’s foundation, and the foundation on the surface of the Earth ... and so on.

None of these things can just hold themselves up on their own. There has to be something at the “bottom of it all” that holds everything above it up without being held up itself. This something must have the ability to hold things up built into it in a non-derivative way (Feser, 27).

This [kind of] cause doesn’t need to have any potential for existence that needs to be actualized in the first place. It just is actual, always and already actual.

It’s the foundation on which everything above it rests. And it’s not time dependent. Time is irrelevant. It upholds everything at all times.

Once again, we are back to God.

Refer a friend

The Power of Philosophy

These kinds of arguments are powerful because they do not depend on any scientific evidence. They come from the simple, thoughtful contemplation of the world we see around us every day. You should familiarize yourself with them and become comfortable discussing them. There are plenty more where these came from.

If you’re interested, Edward Feser outlines several in terms laymen like you and I can understand in his book, Five Proofs Of The Existence Of God. Feser is a master communicator. He is clever, insightful, and succinct. Here is a great (short) summary interview with Feser about the arguments discussed above:

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“Operation Epic Fury” — the joint U.S./Israel attack on Iran — kicked off at 1:15 AM eastern time on February 28, 2026. Within a few hours, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed along with several of the country’s top leaders. Within a few days, the entire military infrastructure, missile production and launch facilities, navy, and security apparatus of the nation of Iran was in shambles.

The justification for this attack on a sovereign nation centered on both its motivational and operational pursuit of nuclear weapons. According to U.S. Special Envoy to Iran, Steve Witkoff on Saturday, February 21st, the Iranians were “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.”

Very few people with a pulse were saddened to hear the news about the decapitation of one of the most notoriously terroristic and brutal theocratic dictatorships on planet Earth. But as Christians who claim to hold to Just War Theory (JWT), what should we be thinking, not only about the decision to strike Iran in this way, but about what will happen as a result?

Both of those are very important questions.

What to Believe?

On June 22, 2025, the United States Air Force reached out and touched Iran with “Operation Midnight Hammer.” You may recall that we were told that mission completely “obliterated” any hope for Iran’s quest to obtain nuclear weapons. At the time, I wrote the following:

… anyone with a shred of respect for Just War Theory should have been in a state of existential turmoil [regarding that mission]. Preemptive attacks are very difficult to justify under JWT for one simple reason — going to war is supposed to be a “last resort.”

For that reason, I tread lightly here again. We have been fed intelligence reports in the past (see: “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and the Iraq War in 2003) that were used to justify wars that turned out not only to be started on false premises, but that also became poorly thought-out conflicts that led to disastrous consequences for America, its warfighters, and the people of the other countries involved.

In this case, the intelligence that was reported was that Iran was “very close” to obtaining a nuclear weapon. If that is true (big “if”) — and with all of the above as background — this may be a rare case where JWT does justify a preemptive strike.

The Iran-Hamas-Hezbollah axis is a cesspool of evil that is, and has been, wreaking havoc in the Middle East. Not only so, but the participants would like nothing better than to spread their chaos to the ends of the Earth. If Iran were to obtain a nuclear capability, the threat to any hope for peace in that region — or around the world — would disintegrate.

With all that said, when assessing the decision to launch that mission from a JWT standpoint, it falls well within the boundaries of a morally justifiable preemptive attack based on the following;

• The action was meant to avoid a greater threat to millions of human beings.

• The action was limited to nuclear facility enrichment and production sites. To the best of our knowledge, there were zero human casualties.

• The action was limited in scope and location.

• The president specifically stated that we have nothing but love for the people of Iran.

• There is no indication that we will continue (as we have in the past) to pursue “regime change,” “nation-building,” insert ourselves into the internal politics of another nation, or put any American troops on the ground for any of those purposes.

If we find that the threat of a nuclear Iran was well-founded — and if all these things remain true — I believe the U.S. attack on Iran fits within the boundaries of just war doctrine. If not, anyone who claims to value JWT needs to stop what they’re doing and be honest with themselves. Do we honor the tenets of JWT or do we mock them?

If the Iranian nuclear program was “completely obliterated” in June, how is it that they were “a week away from having industrial-grade bomb making material” last week?

Or, to put it another way, “Which time were they lying to us?”

This isn’t just a moot point. The United States government executed a preemptive strike on Iran. That’s a big deal when it comes to honoring JWT.

If Iran’s nuclear threat was “completely obliterated” in June, I find it hard to believe they completely resurrected it in eight short months. And if Iran’s nuclear threat was not obliterated in June, why did they tell us it was?

In either case, it makes the decision to initiate preemptive combat operations questionable. And that puts our claim to a just cause on morally rocky ground.

But JWT is not just about the ethics of going to war. There are other considerations that pertain whether the war was begun legitimately or not.

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Right Conduct of War

When we think of JWT, most of the emphasis is on the reasons we enter into the conflict (jus ad bello). But JWT consists of much more than that — specifically the morally acceptable way to conduct a war (jus in bello), and the morally defensible plan for its aftermath (jus post bello).

The practices of the United States in the conduct of war does not seem to be of a concern here. No country goes to greater lengths to avoid collateral damage to civilians than the U.S. In fact, there have been many times where that concern acts to the detriment of our own troops.

That said, accidents happen. They already have. We have evidence that an errant munition has already killed 150 girls at a school in Minab, Iran. This is a tragic example of the danger of armed conflict no matter how fastidious you are about conducting it in a morally justified way. In this case, no one suggests or believes that the U.S. deliberately targeted this school. And — unless we learn differently — this accident does not call the morality of the way we are conducting the war into question.

The after-war considerations are another story.

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Considering the Consequences

In my personal opinion, the post-attack considerations of “Epic Fury” are by far the most damning to the defense of this conflict on JWT grounds. In short, no one is complaining about the destruction of one of the most notorious sponsors of terrorism in the world. But there is a huge difference between the autocratic leadership of Iran and the Persian people who used to be aligned with western values of liberty and human rights. We all share hope for the people of Iran to be freed from the shackles of their brutal existence. But what is the plan for them after the shock-and-awe is over?

Here are some things that should have been addressed before the bombs started dropping. Maybe they were but we sure haven’t heard anything about them. Either way, they should be evaluated based on the stated objectives of the operation.

But those objectives are nebulous at best. It’s hard to know if you are adhering to JWT when you don’t know what the goals of the conflict are. But, based on interviews with senior government officials (including the President and Secretary of State), they fall generally within the following categories. Without getting too far down in the weeds …

The elimination and/or prevention of the state of Iran’s ability to obtain nuclear weapons (i.e. nuclear fissile material)

This is notoriously difficult to determine. It’s the reason we are completely unclear about whether or not their nuclear enrichment programs were “completely obliterated” last June or not. If these programs have been moved deep underground, it is impossible to know the extent to which they’ve been damaged. The only way to confirm it is to put inspectors inside those facilities. That would require “boots on the ground” in some capacity. This something we’ve been assured is not on the table, but the specter of it should be too horrific to consider.

The destruction of Iran’s ability to deliver nuclear weapons (i.e. ballistic missiles and launchers)

Before “Epic Fury” began, it was estimated that Iran had about 2,500 missiles in its inventory. As of this writing, they have fired about 500 of those, and launched about 2,000 drone attacks. These attacks have been initiated against 11 different countries (Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, and Azerbaijan).

As of today, we know that hundreds of missiles have been intercepted en-route, but there are zero verified reports about how many of Iran’s missiles have been destroyed. However, the numbers must be significant since the regime’s ability to launch missile and drone attacks has been reduced by 90%+ and about 75% of their missile launchers have been eliminated.

The erasure of Iran’s navy — to prevent their ability to obstruct shipping lanes or deliver weapons

Before the conflict, Iran’s navy consisted of 145+ combat vessels (frigates, corvettes, patrol ships, missile boats, and submarines). Of those, at least 30 of their major combatant ships and one submarine have been confirmed sunk. What remains consists of mostly small, fast-attack boats and about 24 submarines.

Regime change

The final, and most important, goal of this military intervention has been to decapitate the Iranian leadership regime so as to stop its continued exportation of terrorist activities. President Trump has called for the country’s “unconditional surrender.”

How is that going?

In an ideal world, once the senior Shiite theocrats were removed, the liberty-seeking Persian people would rise up and demand a different government. How likely is that to occur?

A majority of the leadership was killed on the first day of the war. That sounded great at first. But when the president called for Iran’s unconditional surrender, the response he got amounted to a giant, “Over our dead bodies!”

Apparently, they meant it.

Shortly thereafter, the Ayatollah Khamenei’s son was installed in his father’s place. Reports about him have suggested that he is his father “on steroids.” The clerical body that announced the new Ayatollah, “did not hesitate for a minute” in choosing a new leader, despite “the brutal aggression of the criminal America and the evil Zionist regime.”

So much for regime change.

Anyone who thinks these folks are going to roll over and play dead, submit to U.S. demands for unconditional surrender, or return to the negotiating table anytime soon, is delusional. If anything, they are going to drag this out as long and as brutally as they can.

Which leaves us with the JWT dilemma — “What comes next?”

Real Global Impact

By all indications, this conflict is not going to end well or end soon. Iran certainly doesn’t show any inclination to give up. They will crush any internal resistance to their theocracy. They will attempt to engage proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas to do their bidding anywhere, and in any way, they can. There is a good chance they will activate “sleeper cells” to lash out against their enemies both here and in western Europe. Either that, or lone sympathizers will take matters into their own hands.

Apparently, some already have.

As I’ve said before, their theology longs for chaos to usher in a new world under the “Twelfth Imam.”

In the meantime, we are spending what some estimate to be a billion dollars a day executing a war with no end in sight. No big deal, right? I mean, what’s a billion dollars a day when you’re a mere $39 Trillion in debt? We are depleting our weapons and our logistical supply chain with every sortie flown, thereby diminishing our ability to respond to serious threats we face in other places. All this at a time when the conflict is also driving the price of oil through the roof.*

These constitute the real effects of our intervention in Iran. They combine to threaten a painful and ugly existence for all of us, our children, and grandchildren.

For all these reasons, these factors should be part of the moral calculus of engaging in war and considering its repercussions. Weighing the realistic outcomes of war is no less important than considering the justification for entering into it.

War Powers

JWT is not some antiquated theoretical nonsense that only applies to a less complicated time. Ignoring its implications can be corrosive to any civil society — especially to one that is founded on biblical principles like the Constitutional Republic in which we live.

Declaring war was supposed to be done only after engaging in morally serious deliberations.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution makes that very clear. The power to declare war rests only with Congress, while the responsibility to manage the military belongs to the President (Article 2, Section 2).

Understandably, an immediate threat to the nation could require immediate action. In that case, it was understood that the president could go it alone temporarily if the military was required to defend the nation. But after World War II, presidents began engaging our military in actions that didn’t seem all that “defensive.”

So, in 1973, because of the bickering and infighting that was going on surrounding our involvement in Vietnam, Congress passed the War Powers Act to address this issue. This law requires the president to “notify Congress within 48 hours in writing and include “a full account of the circumstances under which such hostilities were initiated, the estimated scope and duration of such hostilities, and the constitutional and legislative authority under which the introduction of hostilities took place.”

It also requires that “hostilities commenced pursuant to [the Act] shall not be sustained beyond thirty days from the date of their initiation” with another thirty days allowed for withdrawal from the action.

President Nixon vetoed the act. Congress — in a rare display of uniformity — overrode his veto. That’s how important this issue was to them at the time.

Please note that this does not empower the president to engage in war-fighting whenever he wants. That’s unconstitutional.

Nor does it permit him to do whatever he wants for 60 days. That’s not what the War Powers Act says.

Standing By the Troops

A few days ago, a friend texted me to ask why I thought our local congressman “wasn’t standing by the troops.” I wasn’t sure what he meant. Then, I learned that he was prompted to ask me this because our congressman was one of only two Republicans to vote against their own president to limit his actions by invoking the War Powers Act with regard to “Operation Epic Fury.”

This congressman is a West Point graduate who served in the elite 75th Ranger Regiment from 1988-2000 during the first Gulf War. So, it seems like quite a charge to claim he wasn’t “standing by the troops.” He knows more than almost anyone about the costs of going to war.

In fact, I submit he is one who is standing by the troops, regardless of party affiliation. As he put it, “the moral hazard posed by a government no longer constrained by our Constitution is a grave threat.” Equally as irresponsible is “a Congress that is happy to cut checks to fund a war they refuse to authorize.”

In the 80-year timespan since World War II, tens of thousands of Americans have died in various conflicts around the world. Countless more have been maimed and wounded while they — and their families — have suffered as a result. Yet, Congress hasn’t had the integrity to declare war since 1942.

That’s irresponsible moral cowardice.

As a father of five sons who have served on active duty (three of whom still do) at the tip of the spear in every branch of the military except the Coast Guard — in Iraq (multiple times), Afghanistan (multiple times), UAE, South Korea, Indonesia, Syria, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Egypt and probably other places I don’t even know about — I am sick and tired of politicians who, without any jeopardy to themselves, are happy to catcall or cheer from the sidelines as our young men and women get dragged through the sands of the Middle East. It’s notable that those who bear the brunt of those incursions are rarely the sons or daughters of those who refuse to even take the time to vote.

And let me be clear. I’m not complaining about the mission because I don’t want it to affect my own family. My sons knew the burden of service when the volunteered to join the military. So did every other service member. They took that risk on their own accord and I respect and honor them for doing so.

That’s why they call it “service.”

But they accepted that obligation with the promise that they were serving under the leadership of a morally righteous constitutional system that took their service as seriously as they offered it.

Maybe this war won’t result in “boots on the ground” in Iran. I pray that’s the case. But for those who support our venturing toward another undeclared, undefined, unending war, I also pray that they consider the moral implications that follow.

The least we can do is debate the justice of the cause and the moral weight of its consequences. JWT exists for good reason. The integrity of our republic and the value of human life — both at home and in Iran — are at stake.

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Note

* The impact of the price of oil on the world economy — including our friends, allies, and other big players — can be catastrophic. Some respond to this issue by claiming the U.S. currently only receives 5% our our oil from the Persian Gulf region. That’s true. But what about our allies?

The estimated share of oil imports from Persian Gulf / Middle East is as follows:

China: ~45–50%

India: ~55–60%

Japan: ~70–75%

South Korea: ~65–75%

In short, our economy largely depends on a stable petro-dollar, and this conflict threatens to unravel that dominance while — at the same time — the BRICS Alliance (consisting of ten countries: Brazil, China, South Africa , Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates) is becoming a larger and more substantial threat to the petro-dollar’s influence on the world economy altogether.

No issue in this country is more divisive than abortion. Neither is there any other issue that demonstrates the moral bankruptcy and cowardice of many of our politicians on both sides of the aisle. The evolving views of “the most pro-life president in history” are a case study in why that is so.

The Extremism of the Left

Those on the Left decided long ago that there is no limit to the extent they will go to justify killing unborn children, some of them even after birth. The “my body, my choice” mantra is their rallying cry — a motto that not only pushes human autonomy past any ethically reasonable limit but also willfully ignores the biological fact that there are two bodies involved in an abortion decision.

These folks used to claim to want to keep abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” But the pseudo-sincerity of that claim evaporated anytime you tried to probe what it actually meant. It turned out “rare” was not a real criterion for them at all.

They will accuse pro-lifers of “forcing” women to give birth even in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. The accusation is not only false, it is a tactic used to try to paint pro-lifers as extremists. But if you ask them if they’ll agree to limit abortion except in those cases, they never will.

Here’s the problem with that position: Less than 1% of abortions involve rape, incest, or a danger to the life of the mother. This means that the abortion rights crowd protects 99% of abortions by a disingenuous emotional appeal to something that almost never occurs.

So, who’s the extremist?

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A Morally Reprehensible Foundation

Every defense of abortion denies the biological fact that the unborn is a living human being. Once you deny that, it’s easy to justify killing it by invoking a myriad of reasons you try to use to make it acceptable.

You focus on the outcome instead of the act.

Abortion defenders are masters at this. But, sadly, many pro-lifers are comfortable using the same kind of logic to a different end. Neither is morally acceptable. To understand why, look back to 2009.

After the 2008 presidential election, the Catholic Church spent a ton of money promoting its pro-life stance by running the following ad nationwide. This heart-tugging appeal to “imagine the potential” claimed to make the pro-life case by having us contemplate the life that would have been squandered if our newly-elected president’s mother had decided to have him aborted in light of the difficulties she faced bringing him into this world:

Though many praised the ad for the power of its message, thoughtful pro-lifers criticized it for good reason. It is based on a consequentialist ethic that can be used just as easily to make the opposite point.

Consequentialism is a view of morality that looks at results and makes ethical decisions based on whether or not we like the outcomes we achieve from them. In the case of the Catholic ad above, the preferred outcome was the first African American president. Because forgoing an abortion led to the desired result, it gave us a reason to oppose abortion.

This seems reasonable on the surface … until you think about it for more than 10 seconds.

What if Barack Obama had turned out to be a drug dealer who engaged in gangland violence and ended up in jail at age 17? Would hindsight have led us to the opposite conclusion? Would those negative consequences have been sufficient reasons to say that abortion is a great idea?

No.

Careful pro-life advocates insist that abortion is wrong not because of the possible consequences that may follow from it, but because of what it is in and of itself — the taking of innocent human life.

Abortion is immoral in the same way rape, or sex-trafficking, or child abuse are immoral. Abortion is an objective moral wrong whether Barack Obama becomes president of the United States or a gangland murderer.

So, why do I bring this up? A short history lesson will explain.

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The Business Man “Evolves”

Back in 1999, businessman Donald Trump told us that while he was personally against abortion, he was also “very pro-choice.”

Think about that. People who hold this view are saying that they see abortion as a grave moral wrong because it takes the life of an innocent human being … but that they don’t want to tell anyone else not to commit that grave moral wrong.

This is morally incoherent. But there’s more.

Fast-forward to 2016. When he decided to run for president, Trump claimed to be “very, very proud to say that [he is] pro-life.”

What changed?

Only “Superstars” are Valuable

During the first Republican presidential debate that year, Trump explained exactly what changed:

“Friends of mine years ago were going to have a child, and it was going to be aborted. And it wasn’t aborted. And that child today is a total superstar, a great, great child. And I saw that. And I saw other instances ...”

Donald Trump was moved by the consequence of his friend’s decision not to abort their child because that child turned out to be a “superstar.” Please note the hollow consequentialism in Trump’s reasoning.

If you don’t see it, he cleared it up for us in a September 3, 2015 interview with the Daily Caller. That’s when editor Jamie Weinstein asked Trump specifically about his change of heart experience and if he “would have changed his view on abortion if the child [referred to above] had become a ‘total loser?’”

Donald Trump’s response:

“I’ve never thought of it. That’s an interesting question. I’ve never thought of it. Probably not, but I’ve never thought of it. I would say no, but in this case it was an easy one because he’s such an outstanding person.” (emphasis mine)

I have to accept Trump’s assertion that he has “never thought of it,” but I don’t say that as a compliment. As Yogi Berra might describe Trump’s “evolving view” on abortion: “When he sees a fork in the road, he takes it.”

But that’s not the end of it.

The “Most Pro-Life” President?

In February 2024, Trump signaled that he would support a nationwide 15-week ban on abortion. This was deemed an “extreme” position by abortion supporters (including the American media) who willfully deny the fact that almost every country in Europe has imposed a 12-week ban on abortion. But I digress.

Two months later, on April 8th, Trump delivered a widely-heralded statement clarifying his stance on the issue in anticipation of the 2024 presidential election. Unfortunately, neither the statement nor his subsequent actions clarified anything. Instead, they provide a case study in the moral bankruptcy our political leaders display on the abortion issue. Trump’s statement included the following:

“My view is now that we have abortion where everyone wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both. And whatever they decide must be the law of the land … Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that’s what they will be. At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people …”

“The Republican party should always be on the side of the miracle of life.”

So, which is it? Should we honor the “will of the people” or should we “always be on the side of the miracle of life?” Because those can be two wildly different things.

Two days later, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that abortion in its state was prohibited at any point in a pregnancy, the only exception being to save the life of the mother. Within a few hours, Trump was asked if Arizona had gone too far.

“Yeah, they did,” he said, “that’ll need to be straightened out.”

Trump’s plea on Monday to let the states decide was overruled on Wednesday … when Trump didn’t like the way a state decided.

Is it any wonder no one takes him seriously on this issue?

Caving on the Hyde Amendment

Most Americans are probably unaware of the Hyde Amendment. This add-on to a federal spending bill was first introduced in 1976 by Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois, and implemented in 1980. Its sole purpose was to prevent federal funding of abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. It first passed Congress on a 312-93 vote — an overwhelmingly bipartisan measure. It has been altered slightly from time to time, but has remained as an attachment to every spending bill the U.S. Congress has passed since then.

This is not a radical idea. It’s based on the simple premise that, regardless of your view on abortion, it is unreasonable to permit federal tax money paid by citizens who oppose abortion to fund it. There have been attempts to remove the Hyde Amendment from the law over the years (most notably by Hillary Clinton in 2016), but it remains in place.

But maybe not for long.

In January 2026, as President Donald Trump was engaged in the usual political bickering over passing “comprehensive health care reform,” he made the astounding appeal to his fellow Republicans that:

“You have to be a little flexible” on the Hyde Amendment, Trump told House Republicans as they gathered in Washington for a caucus retreat to open the midterm election year. “You gotta be a little flexible. You gotta work something. You gotta use ingenuity.”

This from the man who, in the previously referenced April 9, 2024 video statement, proclaimed that he “… was proudly the person responsible for the ending of … Roe-v-Wade,” is now willing to trade tax-payer funded abortion to score a political victory with Congress.

The president fancied himself as solidly pro-life because he appointed three Justices to a U. S. Supreme Court that eventually overturned Roe-v-Wade and, yes, he deserves great credit for that.

But it seems that the pro-life victories that have been achieved since he did that have come about in spite of his personal convictions, not because of them.

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Pathetic, Pandering Politicians

It wouldn’t be fair to isolate Donald Trump for criticism where this issue is concerned. The examples of political pandering on abortion from both sides of the aisle are legion. Politicians of both parties do it all the time. That’s the problem with consequentialism. You never know where you’ll end up when you follow it.

We expect this kind of degenerate moral reasoning from those who support abortion for any reason at any time. But for those who claim to be “pro-life,” they should be ashamed.

Here’s the problem: For the last 50 years, so-called “pro-life” politicians have been able to hide behind the smokescreen of Roe-v-Wade. While triumphantly claiming the pro-life label, they used Roe as an excuse to do absolutely nothing to earn it. Abortion has been their election-time pugil stick — a toothless tool used to pander for votes by making the other guys the enemy — while actually outlawing the travesty of abortion never entered their minds.

Once Dobbs-v-Jackson removed the smokescreen, the moral vacuousness of their “thinking” was exposed. Today, we live with the consequences.

The Simple Case for Life

It shouldn’t be this hard. The moral reasoning behind the pro-life view is straightforward:

Premise 1 is straight-up moral clarity. Premise 2 is a scientific fact. The conclusion follows both philosophically and ethically.

For the life of me, I will never understand why no politician even begins to make the case this way. But if you claim to be pro-life, I would encourage you to demand that your local representative start doing just that. Seventy million (and counting) dead babies is enough.

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In January 1973, the landmark court case we now know as Roe-v-Wade legalized abortion in America. Many who defended abortion claimed that Roe made the “right” to abortion “settled law.” But those of us who value every human life didn’t see it that way. We insisted that Roe-v-Wade no more settled the moral question of abortion than the infamous Dred Scott decision “settled” the idea that slaves had no right to U. S. citizenship. And so, the fight raged on.

Then, in June 2022, the Dobbs-v-Jackson case relegated Roe to exactly the place where it belonged — the dustbin of poorly-argued Supreme Court history. Some pro-life folks considered that to be a victory. And it was — of sorts. But today, the victory seems hollow. In places like my home state of Ohio, the situation has actually gotten worse.

So, what can you do to convince people in your little corner of the world about the absolute horror of abortion? How can you make the case for life in a way that cannot be dismissed as a simple “religious opinion”? I believe each of us bears an obligation to do that. And I want to suggest a powerful method for making a case that will hit home, even with people for whom you think it’s a lost cause.

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The Case For Life

Several years ago, a local group asked me to give a presentation on how to connect Christian apologetics and the pro-life cause. My connection to the Life Training Institute (LTI) made that task an easy one.

Scott Klusendorf, the founder and president of LTI, taught me long ago how to use science and philosophy to show what the unborn is, why they are valuable, and why that makes taking pre-born human life a grave moral wrong. The argument is not in the least bit “religious.” It is a rational and reasoned case that points to the most basic of all human rights — the right to life. As I told the group, the case we make is perfectly compatible and consistent with what the Bible teaches. And that is just one more reason to believe the Bible is a reflection of the truth about ultimate reality.

Tell And Show

The presentation I used started with science. I offered the plain, scientific evidence for when life begins that you can find in any embryology textbook. This isn’t a mystery. It begins at the moment of conception.

Next, I used basic philosophical reasoning. I showe that there is no difference between the person you are today and the embryo you once were. Certainly, there is no difference that justifies taking your life at that earlier stage in your development.

Finally, after making a reasoned case for my position, I warned the audience that I was about to show them a 60-second video clip. There is no narration on the video. It is nothing but a series of images that show the aftermath of abortion in all three trimesters of development.

I did this carefully and compassionately. I warned the audience that the video was graphic and I gave anyone who wanted it a chance to leave the room or cover their eyes before I showed it. And then I played this:

This Is Abortion Video from Life Training Institute on Vimeo.

Repercussions

The presentation I gave that day was no different than any other I’ve given. Nor was the reaction to it. But several months later, a friend from the group told me a story about what happened afterward.

He said that he had never seen the argument against abortion presented in quite the way I presented it. It had moved him to put up a Facebook post about it with a link to the video I had shown. No big deal.

But there’s more to the story.

My friend’s post drew some attention and discussion. Little did he know that some of that attention was from a European lady whom my friend had never met or spoken to. He and she just happened to be bird lovers and members of the same online group of folks who shared that interest. The lady was an abortion supporter. She was also an atheist.

The images horrified her.

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Seeing Is Believing

Because the post had provoked her to anger, she contacted my friend through the bird-lover group to challenge him about posting it. This initiated a back-and-forth discussion that lasted for weeks.

Eventually, the bird-loving lady not only changed her view on abortion; she was also compelled by my friend’s reasoning to take things a step further. He convinced her to reconsider objections to Christianity itself. By the time he told me the story, the European lady had become a Christian. She was soliciting my friend’s advice about how to approach her “hard-core atheist” son to invite him to do the same.

All because she saw an image.

One Thousand Words

Some people are impervious to careful arguments. For whatever reason, they refuse to consider the logic of the pro-life position. But even if those pro-life arguments fall on deaf ears, the impact of video can be monumental. The European bird lover is not alone. The same thing happened to Ruben Navarette.

In August of 2015, Navarette saw the Planned Parenthood videos that had leaked earlier that summer. For him, that changed everything. He wrote an article on the Daily Beast website explaining why the videos made him question his “pro-choice” position. Ruben Navarette had been a supporter of abortion rights for 30 years. But seeing what abortion is and what it does made him reconsider his position.

Pictures do something words never could.

The Power To Persuade

We use horrifying images in driving classes to convince teens of the dangers of texting and driving. We show before and after images of methamphetamine users to see where drug abuse leads. The state of Wisconsin aird disturbing videos to boost awareness of sex trafficking. And who can ever forget the images they’ve seen of the Holocaust death camps, the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, or the old commercials that demonstrated “this is your brain on drugs”?

We use images because they’re effective in making important points.

Seeing injustice has a way of connecting our intellect to our emotion. The power in that connection is what compels us to change our behavior. Images allow rational human beings to see exactly what abortion is all about.

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Thoughtful And Effective

I would never advocate shoving pictures of aborted children in the face of an unsuspecting observer. That’s just plain rude. And while I understand the motivation to do that, I also know that shock value can rebound into anger and dismissal.

I don’t want to be rude and I don’t want to shock people. But I will keep making a rational, reasonable case for my view, then showing images of abortion to make it hit home because my goal is bigger than that.

I want to make people understand, through reasoned argumentation, what abortion actually is and why it’s wrong. I want them to see the reality of abortion that continues to this day. The one that has resulted in the death of over 65 million children. I want to appeal to their humanity by connecting their heads with their hearts. I don’t just want to change their personal feelings about it. I want to motivate those who condone abortion to change their minds and behaviors.

I don’t just want to talk about it. And I don’t just want to make people look at it.

I want to make it stop.

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It’s been a long-time in the works, but today the Second Edition of my book, Confident Christianity launches on Amazon. This is not a minor revision. With more than 70% more content, the update includes:

• At least partial — but in several cases complete — rewrites of the original chapters.

• Six completely new chapters.

• Archaeological evidence for the both the Old and New Testaments.

• Historical evidence for the origin, transmission, and translations of the Bible.

• Discussion questions at the end of each chapter for small groups, along with recommended reading on the topic of each chapter.

• Greatly expanded Recommended Reading list.

I would be honored not only if you would order a copy, but if you would be willing to write an honest review on Amazon. That is the only real way to ensure the algorithm gets the book in front of more eyes.

Thanks for considering it. I am including one of the new chapters as a sample below for subscribers to True Horizon …

A Merry Christmas to you and yours,

Bob

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Chapter 15

A WORLD WITH MIRACLES

As I stated in the “Intermission,” the existence of some kind of God not only makes sense based on the evidence we’ve uncovered, it seems to be the most reasonable explanation for all of it. And that leads to a startling conclusion.

We live in a supernatural world.

That’s not a weird, spooky thing to say. All it means is that there is some aspect of reality that lies outside the physical world. And it’s not a religious claim floating in an evidential vacuum. We can say it because, according to the science of Big Bang cosmology, all of physical reality (matter, energy, space, and time) came into existence at a point in the finite past. Whatever caused all matter, energy, space, and time to come into existence cannot be composed of matter, energy, space, or time. That’s just basic logic. And since we define the natural world — the universe we live in — as physical reality, it means that there is something that lies outside physical reality. Something beyond nature.

Something supernatural.

The word supernatural is just a term that describes the logical conclusion of the scientific evidence we covered in Section II. It’s an inference we get, not just from what we learn from Big Bang cosmology, but from a combination of all the evidence discussed in the previous section of this book. Philosophy tells us that non-physical things like truth, justice, love, and goodness are all real, even if we can’t see, touch, taste, hear, or smell them.

We find evidence of a soul in all living things. That’s not physical either. We see that information and design infuse life — both details that can only result from the actions of a non-physical mind. Finally, we can’t escape the fact that we live in a moral universe. All of us recognize morals are very real, but you certainly can’t hold them in your hands.

All of this screams out for an explanation. It means that a reasonable, holistic view of reality must allow for the supernatural.

Theistic Expectations

In Chapter 6, we defined theism as “the view that God is a real, personal, moral agent who exists apart from the physical universe but is free to act within it because he created it … If God exists, and theism is true, there should also be evidence that this God interacts with the world he created. That’s what theism means.”

That leads us to a logical conclusion — namely that the implications of the evidence for God’s existence imply that there is a supernatural aspect to ultimate reality and therefore to a deity who is at least capable of interacting with the world. And we have a word that describes such an interaction.

It’s called a miracle.

Somehow, our materialistic culture has convinced us that believing in miracles is crazy. But, as you can see, it’s not crazy at all. It follows logically from the evidence we see all around us. We have plenty of evidence that God exists. If he does, it would also make sense that such a God could communicate to us in such a way that we would have a record of it. In fact, you might say we should expect it. And that is what we call the Bible or, as I referred to it in Chapter 4, “Special Revelation.”

Are Miracles “Allowed”?

The atheist English philosopher, David Hume, is famous for arguing against miracles. In a nutshell, he insisted that believing someone who claims to witness a miracle is mistaken or lying is always more rational than believing the laws of nature actually suspended those laws. Hume demanded that the sheer improbability of a miracle happening is all the reason we need to deny that any miracle could ever happen. Others have claimed that the laws of nature are unchanging and, since miracles would seem to defy those laws, they can’t be possible.

Both these arguments against miracles engage in what’s called “circular reasoning.” They assume what they’re trying to prove. Folks like Hume demand that we dismiss the possibility of miracles because they are, by definition, so rare. But if “miracles” happened all the time … they wouldn’t be miracles. Hume, and others like him, reject miracles because they deny the supernatural exists. Their logic amounts to saying, “Miracles don’t happen because miracles can’t happen.” In philosophical talk, this is called “begging the question.”

They rule out miracles by presupposition — before they’ve even considered the evidence.

Getting into details about specific occurrences of miracles is beyond the scope of this book. But I want to offer one mind-blowing example of exactly what I’m talking about.

A Mind-Blowing Miracle

In 1995, Oliver Sacks wrote a book, An Anthropologist on Mars, that contained the true story of a man named Virgil.*

Val Kilmer later starred in the movie, At First Sight, which was an adaptation of one chapter in Sacks’ book.

Virgil was a 50-year-old man who had been blind since he was a child. He had successful surgery to correct his eye condition, but five weeks later he was still struggling. A doctor had surgically repaired Virgil’s eyes. But that was only part of the problem.

It turns out, our ability to see actually comes in two parts. The physical structure and connections in our eyeballs must be correct, of course. But it doesn’t stop there. The cerebral cortex must also properly process the visual signals the eyes send to the brain. People who lose their eyesight quickly lose the ability to process those signals. When doctors repair their eyes, the brain must “re-learn” how to see. That’s what makes this story so interesting.

For weeks, Virgil saw lights and shapes in a cubist conglomeration that made no sense. His brain couldn’t synthesize the signals it received. When he looked at a cat “all Virgil could see was a confusion, a flat surface of parallel and criss-crossing lines; he could not see them as solid objects going up or coming down in three-dimensional space … this was one reason the cat, visually, was so puzzling: he would see the paw, a nose, the tail, an ear, but could not see all of them together, the cat as a whole.”

After a few weeks, Virgil’s processing power gradually improved. That’s when his wife was thrilled to report that “Virgil finally put a tree together — he now knows that the trunk and leaves go together to form a complete unit.”

That quote from Virgil’s wife set off an alarm in National Review columnist Keith Mano’s mind. It sounded familiar, but he didn’t know why. Then, it hit him.**

The word-picture of an unmade tree set off associations in my mind. I remembered Jesus and the Bethsaida blind man from the book of Mark … “They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?” He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.”***

Keith Mano realized that what he had always considered a poetic image — “they look like trees walking around” — was actually a clinical description. Both Virgil and the blind man from Bethsaida experienced the same thing.

It turns out Jesus performed two miracles that day. First, he fixed the man’s eyes. Then, he instantaneously repaired the man’s ability to synthesize visual signals.

This is a medical detail no first-century author could have ever known about the two-step process that allows us to see things. It’s simply the author’s observation of an event he recorded just as he witnessed it. Two thousand years later, modern science has finally caught up enough to understand exactly what Jesus did that day.

Many people have experienced events like this — events that atheistic materialism can’t even begin to explain. Theologian Craig Keener has written a two-volume, nearly 1200-page tome about these kinds of things titled ever-so-cleverly, Miracles. His research includes almost 300 pages of detailed footnotes corroborating his claims. These are not anecdotal stories somebody says they heard about from somebody else. They include documented cases of things that only make sense in a supernatural world.

Evidence for Christianity

There’s an important reason to talk about all this. Many people who reject the idea that Christianity is actually true, do so because both the Bible and Christian history contain miracles. Their reasoning says that any belief system that includes, or is based on, miracles must be false. And they say this for the same reason Hume rejects the possibility of miracles in the first place — because of the presupposition that miracles can’t happen.

So, if the goal here is to have a Confident Christianity, this is a topic that we must deal with. There is no denying that Christianity contains an appeal to the miraculous. But the point I want to make is that it is perfectly rational to accept that appeal. Remember, the first half of this book shows substantial, reasonable evidence that God exists. And that evidence leads to supernatural implications. To summarize:

If God exists, miracles are at least possible.

Any being who could bring the entire known universe into existence in an instant would be perfectly capable of acting inside the universe he created. In fact, some would say the greatest miracle of all is the first sentence in the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” An all-powerful, omni-benevolent, intelligent, moral, supernatural entity brought the natural world into existence by the sheer power of his will.

That’s quite a miracle! And we have confirmed it through the collection of some of the most robust scientific evidence for any event that has ever occurred.

That being the case, it’s not really a stretch to conclude that doing things like turning water into wine or walking on the water he created would be out of the realm of possibility. Actually, those kinds of miracles are small potatoes for a being like that.

Yes, Christianity and the Bible contain miraculous elements that we must be open to accepting. But, like the rest of the evidence we’ve been discussing, we don’t accept them blindly. Evidence for God’s existence makes them at least possible. As you will see in the chapters that follow, the miracles that are embedded in historical accounts that are jam-packed with philosophical and historical evidence to support them. Miracles are just one part of that grand story — a story that is so trustworthy and reliable, it compels us to acknowledge the miraculous, too.

We live in a God-haunted world, and part of the evidence for that is a trustworthy scriptural record that ties all this together. That’s where we’re headed next.

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* Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars (Vintage Books: New York, New York, 1995).

** I owe this account and the associated quotes to a 1999 article in National Review magazine, “How a 20^th Century Eye Operation Shows the Bethsaida Miracle Actually Happened,” by Keith Mano. The article is no longer available.

*** Mark 8:22-26.

There’s a resurgence of religious belief going on. It’s been happening for few years, but the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk seems to have accelerated the trend. Young adults — who have been pilloried for their supposed apathy about all things important — are the group that is impacting this movement the most. So, what’s the deal? What in the world is causing such a thing?

I submit “the deal” is the same thing it’s always been. St. Augustine identified it more than 1600 years ago when he said:

The Not-so-New Atheists

Twenty years ago, the so-called “new atheists” like Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason), and Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), were dominating the discussion of God and that was going on in the culture. They made names for themselves by attacking all religious belief as morally equivalent to the fanatical Islamic extremism of September 11, 2001. In March, 2012, they even held the first Reason Rally on the national mall in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the coming victory of reason over blind, religious irrationality. Estimates were that there were almost 30,000 attendees.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the atheistic nirvana.

In 2016, at the the second quadrennial Reason Rally, less than half that number showed up.

No one has heard of the Reason Rally since.

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The Rise & Fall of the Godless

Two years after that first Reason Rally, I wrote about the actions of the self-proclaimed “activist” atheist, Preston Smith, at the Lake Worth, Florida City Commission Meeting. Smith gained national attention when he offered the following invocation:

Mother Earth, we gather today in your redeeming and glorious presence, to invoke your eternal guidance in the universe, the original Creator of all things. May the efforts of this council blend the righteousness of Allah with the all-knowing wisdom of Satan. May Zeus, the great God of justice, grant us strength tonight. Jesus might forgive our shortcomings while Buddha enlightens us through His divine affection. We praise you, Krishna, for the sanguine sacrifice that freed us all. After all, if Almighty Thor is with us, who can ever be against us? And finally, for the bounty of logic, reason, and science, we simply thank the atheists, agnostics, humanists, who now account for 1-in-5 Americans, and [are] growing rapidly.

In closing, let us, above all, love one another, not to obtain mythical rewards for ourselves now, hereafter, or based on superstitious threats of eternal damnation, but rather, embrace secular-based principles of morality — and do good for goodness’ sake. And so we pray ... So, what?!

Smith certainly considered his mockery of religious belief to be clever. Apparently, he thought lumping all the religions together in his “prayer” was some kind of sarcastic proof that they could all be equally dismissed. But people like Smith don’t think things through very well.

The fact that all the religions he mentioned make contradictory claims about reality or that that they all have varying levels of evidence to support them is lost on him. But even more comically, Smith didn’t realize that his defense of atheism was also a religious claim that he expected everyone else to take seriously.

Then, there were the Godless Church Services that were popping up all over the place at about the same time. The movement was growing exponentially among those who claimed to “believe in nothing.” Eventually, it went global. As one of the early leaders of that movement, Sanderson Jones, put it about his London “congregation” (his term):

The thing that we’ve got is that we’re the only non-religious service that works. Rationality is part of it, but we also have the emotional connection,” Jones said. “We are speaking to the whole human.” Sunday Assembly is already talking to an awful lot of humans.

Jones wonders if they might manage to start 2015 congregations by 2015. “It might just be a little bit historical if it goes on like this. We could have a profound impact,” he said. “Throughout history there’s been these moments when an idea takes off: the Great Awakenings. We could suddenly create a great moment …”

These godless movements ended up being flashes in the pan, too. Today, they’re nowhere to be found. But the issue I want to explore is not about the silly things these godless folks did.

I’m more interested in why they did them and how that relates to the current explosion of belief in God.

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Seekers Gonna Seek

Why did those who mocked the idea of religion or the reality of God simultaneously engage in projects that paralleled the practices of those who did believe in Him? What would motivate them to go to such great lengths to replicate the actions of the faithful?

After all, if they really believed what they were saying, there is no God and therefore no standard by which their actions could be judged. That means there is no reasonable explanation or need to do the things they were doing. They should have been partying on the beach instead of attending a “godless church service” on Sunday mornings.

Philosopher Peter Kreeft gives us a formalized explanation for their actions in what he calls the Argument From Desire:

• Premise 1: Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.

• Premise 2: But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy.

• Conclusion: Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire.

Or, as C. S. Lewis so aptly put it:

It turns out that what these “humanists” were actually doing was offering a sad demonstration of the reality of what has come to be known as Blaise Pascal’s “God-shaped hole.”

“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.” ~ Pascal, Pensées (Section I, X, 148)

In other words, instead of getting angry at their atheistic stunts, we should have been feeling compassion for those whose sense of emptiness is so deep they were compelled to respond with navel-gazing mockery toward the only reasonable way they could fill the God-shaped hole in their own hearts.

I submit that Gen ‘Z’ is doing the same thing, but for a better reason.

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The Empty World of Gen ‘Z’

Think about the world Gen ‘Z’ has grown up in.

• They were born around the same time as the September 11th attack on America.

• From their earliest years, the world after has been almost continuously engaged in the “endless wars” our politicians have found to be so irresistible. Some of their parents fought in those wars.

• When they were pre-teens, the country plunged into one of the most protracted, economically painful decades in this country’s economic history — the “Lost Decade” from 2000 to 2009. Their parents were struggling to make ends meet during their formative years.

• They’ve grown up as digital natives in a world where social media has succeeded in creating the loneliest, most anxious generation in human history — a generation with the highest levels of suicide ideation ever recorded.

• When many of them were in high school or college, the COVID disaster shut their world down and left them isolated and unable to engage in any kind of meaningful social interaction.

• They’ve witnessed the social-media-driven political polarization of the country in which politicians spend most of their time demonizing their opponents in pursuit of political power, and almost no time using that political power to find solutions to our problems.

While there are always specific exceptions to these circumstances, in general, their world has not been a happy place. Instead, it’s been empty — a world that offers them no meaning or purpose.

Their entire world has a God-shaped hole in it. And they are begging to have it filled.

A Hope-Filled Answer

For those of us engaged in the project of making the case for Christianity, this is a pivotal moment. Let’s not miss it.

Rarely has the need for offering “a reason for the hope we have” been more critical.

Rarely has the audience been more primed and open to the message.

Rarely have we had as much powerful, compelling evidence for the truth of Christianity at our immediate disposal.

Rarely have the God-shaped holes in people’s lives needed more filling.

God’s people need to be ready and willing to help those holes get filled.

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This summer, my wife and I were privileged to enjoy a European cruise on the Rhine River from Basel, Switzerland, to Amsterdam. One of the stops we made was in Cologne, Germany. And one of the tours we took was among my favorites of the entire vacation. We learned the history and experienced the grandeur of Kölner Dom — the massive cathedral of Cologne that towers 515 feet above the city. That building holds a history that is a microcosm of how God works in this world in ways we can barely comprehend.

A Long History

Builders laid the foundation stone for the cathedral on August 15, 1248. It was completed on October 15, 1880, a mere 632 years later. The history of the fits and starts that occurred along the way would fill a book. But the sentiment that describes it is in some ways the same as for every other cathedral like it. Ken Follett captures that idea in his masterpiece novel published in 1989:

“A cathedral is built for the glory of God — but also to stand as a monument to the ambition of those who build it.” ~ Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth

Kölner Dom lives up to that description in every way. But here, I’d like to focus on the events surrounding the cathedral during World War 2.

Nazi Connoiseurs

Hitler and the Nazis not only fancied themselves racially superior, but also culturally superior, to the rest of the world. Part of their shtick was to elevate art, architecture, and education as a way to preserve the “true” German values of strength, purity, and heroism.

In the early stages of the war, before the bombing of key German industrial centers began, the Nazi regime knew what would soon be coming their way. So, as part of his effort to preserve the culture, Hitler ordered that all the stained-glass windows in Cologne’s cathedral — and many other German sites like it — be removed from the building. The windows were taken out and stored in underground caves and mines, monasteries, and church basements far away from the industrial center of the city.

It’s important to realize that the Nazis didn’t do this out of any sense of reverence for the holiness of the site. They couldn’t have cared less about that. They took this action for purely cultural and selfish reasons. Their goal was to preserve these masterpieces so that after they won the war, they could flaunt them as a monument to their victory and the gloriousness of their cause.

Target Practice

As you can see in the photo above, Kölner Dom juts into the air above every other building on the Cologne skyline. Looking down on the city from above, its distinctive black color and shape made it stand out in an equally obvious way. For this reason, the British Air Force made a decision early-on to never drop bombs on the cathedral.

But just like the Nazis’ reason for saving its windows, the British motivation to spare Kölner Dom was far from reverent. Instead, it was tactical. Having such an unmistakable point of reference on the ground is a gift to a bomber pilot. It’s an easy-to-find reference point he can use to quickly recalibrate his bombing coordinates and thereby locate his intended target, especially on days when partial clouds or smoke may be obscuring the target area.

And the decision paid off.

In the end, Cologne was one of the most heavily bombed cities in Germany. More than 90% of the city was destroyed. Yet, Kölner Dom dominated the skyline even more than it had before. And there’s an important reason it still does.

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Human Failure

Because it was near the center of the city, the cathedral was adjacent to several strategically important targets. The Rhine River bridges to its east and the city’s central train station were within the blast radius of some allied bombs. For that reason, and due to the inaccuracy of weapons systems of the time, some stray bombs did cause damage to the cathedral.

One such errant bomb actually struck the north face of the building. The ensuing explosion rocked its walls and, under normal circumstances, would likely have caused it to collapse.

A blast that large on the walls of any structure sends out a shock wave that causes a massive overpressure of the air inside. The walls of buildings are designed to carry enormous forces vertically, but not horizontally. Trapped inside, the force created by the overpressure has no place to go but out. Since the walls are not designed to withstand outward pressure, they simply succumb. They explode horizontally and the entire building becomes a pile of rubble within a matter of seconds.

But Kölner Dom didn’t do that. And there was a very good reason why.

The overpressure wasn’t trapped inside the cathedral’s walls — because Kölner Dom had no windows.

Despite the Evil Ways of Humans

On the day my wife and I visited Cologne, our city tour guide was an Austrian twenty-something young man who was about to finish his PhD in philosophy. Knowledgeable, friendly, and quite a storyteller, he entertained us for almost three hours. But during his time with us, I noticed a distinct angle with which he shared any information about the cathedral, the Christians who built it, or “religious” people in general.

He always referred to them in the third person. His repeated use of “they” told me he was — like most young Europeans today — not one of “them.” Firmly ensconced in the secular, his language led me to believe he was some kind of agnostic or atheist.

Yet, when he told us the story of Kölner Dom, the Nazis, and the British bombers, he concluded the account with this (as close as I can recall):

“It’s ironic that in the midst of the violence, death, and destruction of a World War, the evil intentions of the Nazis, and the errors of some British bomber pilots — that all of it combined to preserve this church. And when you go inside, you will see why. The builders of this cathedral believed that it exists for only one reason — as a support system for the windows. For them, the light shining through inspires all who enter with the overwhelming presence of their God.”

It’s not often you hear young atheists paraphrasing Romans 8:28.

Unintended Consequences

On September 21st, I was reminded of our tour of Cologne. Ten days earlier, we witnessed one of the most horrific scenes ever broadcast live when 31-year-old Charlie Kirk’s neck exploded in gushing red. Predictably, and understandably, the reaction was the same as it always is: “Why would God allow such a horrible thing to happen to such a good man — a man with a wife and two beautiful young children — in his prime?”

We have academic answers to the question. We have pastoral commitments to his loved ones. But still, we never stop asking, “Why?”

We must consider the answers to those kinds of questions before we experience some life-shattering occurrence in our own lives or in the lives of others. And one of those answers is that we cannot see, and may never know, the consequences of the horror or how God may use it sometime in the future, perhaps long after we depart this life.

It’s hard to imagine how the aftershocks of such a horrific event may impact the future in ways we cannot imagine. To claim it will, sounds like a copout. We want answers now. We’re not good at waiting.

But in this case, we only had to wait eleven days.

Who could have imagined that just eleven days after Charlie Kirk’s shooting, over 100 million people around the world would witness another live event broadcast from State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona — an event in which those 100 million people would see some of the most powerful people on the planet boldly and unapologetically proclaim the Gospel to a world focused on their every word.

That’s an impact no previous evangelist has had over the entire span of his or her life.

Who would have imagined that those 100 million people would see that promising young man’s widow show the kind of forgiveness that can only come from Christ offered to a murderer who never asked for it and shows no signs of ever doing so.

God doesn’t waste anything. He will redeem every circumstance. Though it’s hard for us to see or imagine how that is in the midst of the war, destruction, violence, and pain we perpetrate on one another, he is sovereign.

The doubter can deny that at his peril. The believer can bask in the glory of its truth.

Either way, his light will shine — if we only have eyes to see it.

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No, I am not a Luddite — someone “who opposes or resists technological change.” I have no problem with emerging technologies. I use them all the time. However, there is a difference between leveraging a technology and being unaware of the inherent liabilities that come with the convenience it provides.

Neil Postman touched on the point I’m trying to make in 1985:

“Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” ~ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Nowhere is this adage more applicable than in how we apply the “digitization of everything” to the Bible.

Let’s Get Digital

When I refer to the dangers of a digital Bible, I mean “digital” in two different ways. First, it is about the practice of interpreting the Bible as a collection of discrete packets of information instead of a continuously flowing narrative.

Second, it is about the way the Bible, like any other written text, has been digitized so that we can read it on our electronic devices.

There are dangerous aspects to both. And every Christian needs to be aware of them.

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Discrete Thoughts -vs- Flowing Narrative

It’s hard for us to imagine not having chapters and verses in the Bible. We’ve never seen a Bible without them. I think some people assume they were part of what the original authors wrote down. But the truth is, they haven’t always been there.

Though earlier versions of the Old Testament contained chapter divisions, the first translation of the New Testament to include verses within those chapters was the Geneva translation of 1557. Chapter and verse divisions first appeared in the whole Bible three years later.

The Bible is composed of historical accounts, poetry, technical records, and personal letters, written just like any other form of written communication. They have a narrative flow — a written attempt to paint a word picture that you can only see when you take the whole scene into account. But that makes it hard to find specific thoughts. So, along came the division of the narrative into chapters and verses.

Chapters and verses are quite obviously convenient. Imagine trying to refer someone to a specific passage in the Bible without them! They make it easy to locate our favorite passages when we do Bible study. And it definitely makes it easier to memorize specific thoughts that we believe are important.

Some of those chapter-and-verse combinations have even become icons of the faith — a kind of mini-sermon on a sign. Even people who have never studied the Bible at all have a pretty good idea what this guy is saying just by wearing his T-shirt:

But there are dangers that come with isolating sections of any written document and using them to make a point, even if it’s a good one.

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“Never Read a Bible Verse”

Apologist Greg Koukl has said that the most important lesson he could ever teach any Christian is that they should “never read a Bible verse.” That sounds like a weird thing for someone who cherishes Scripture to say. But Koukl says that precisely because he cherishes Scripture.

It’s essential to recognize not only that the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament didn’t contain chapters and verses, but also that they lacked punctuation altogether. The format in which they were written was a continuous flow of thought. We’ve added divisions in the text to appeal to our modern sensibilities. And there’s nothing wrong with that — unless you forget that you did it.

Our tendency to extract one-liners from the text means that we often take them entirely out of context. The meaning of a phrase or sentence can change dramatically if you isolate it from the complete narrative in which it was written.

Genre Games

The minimal level of analysis that should go into interpreting a passage of Scripture is understanding the genre in which it is written. As an example, take the popular idea to:

“Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” ~ Proverbs 22:6

It’s a proverb — a “wise saying.” It’s not a promise. And there are plenty of Christian parents with rebellious children who will attest to that fact. If you were to treat this line of Scripture as a divine promise, you would be deeply disappointed if it didn’t pan out.

Historical narratives, poetry, theological treatises, and circular letters are all completely different forms of writing. We need to treat them that way.

Target Audience

Audience matters. Old Testament exiles in Babylon are not New Testament Christians in Atlanta, for instance. That’s why the often-repeated, feel-good verse many contemporary Christians love and are quick to claim for themselves is so often misapplied:

“I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” ~ Jeremiah 29:11

This encouragement was written to exiled Jews in Babylon, comforting them with the promise that they would return to their land nearly 60 years later. Unfortunately, many Christians snatch this verse completely out of context and use it to take hold of the prosperous future they think God is promising them when they’re considering a new job. It makes them feel good. But it’s funny that no one ever points to a passage in the same letter that shows up seven verses later:

“I will pursue them with the sword, famine, and plague and will make them abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth and an object of cursing and horror, of scorn and reproach …” ~ Jeremiah 29:18

No one is claiming that verse for themselves. I wonder why?

The real reason is that they don’t like Jeremiah 29:18 because it doesn’t serve their purposes. But what they fail to realize is that the reason verse 29:18 doesn’t apply to them is the same reason Jeremiah 29:11 doesn’t apply to them.

It wasn’t written to them.

The problem isn’t with the content of the passages in question. The problem is with the method they’re using. Snatching a verse out of context almost always leads to bad theology.

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Follow the Flow

This is the problem with digitizing the Bible in this way. Seeing a discrete chapter-and-verse label on a passage leads us to think it’s a discrete thought. But it’s not. It’s part of a larger narrative.

The only place where people will quote a single sentence or phrase from a book as authoritative is when it’s in the Bible. But nobody thinks like that. You wouldn’t do it with any other book you’ve ever read. If you’re confused about how to understand a particular verse, the simple act of reading the entire paragraph in which it is embedded will often clarify its meaning. Always read at least a paragraph. Sometimes, it takes a chapter. But in every case, you have to take into account the context of the book in which the passage appears.

Along the same lines, most of our Bibles today include section headings meant to summarize what will follow. Ignore them. The original authors didn’t put them there. And they can be misleading. In fact, they sometimes interrupt a line of reasoning that is supposed to follow from a previous passage. A subtitle can thereby separate thoughts that were not meant to be separated.

Digital Scripture

Thomas Jefferson famously cut out all the references to miracles or the resurrection in his personal Bible. He didn’t accept that things like that could happen, so he simply deleted them from the book. As a result, Jefferson’s version of the New Testament was only 84 pages long.

Doing that took a lot of time and effort on his part. But imagine if he had an electronic version of the Bible. Cutting and pasting would be a piece of cake! Don’t like some “judgmental” idea you read about in Romans 1? No problem.

Right-click -> Select -> Delete. Voila! It’s gone forever.

This illuminates the second kind of danger that comes with a digital Bible:

Don’t get me wrong. I have the Bible on all my electronic devices. This is not some archaic declaration that the only kind of Bible you should own is a real one that you can hold in your hands.

Personally, I prefer actual books to digital ones. But that’s not my point. The problem with a digitized Bible is that it can be so easily altered by those who control the platform on which it is delivered.

For those of us who grew up with an actual book, this issue is not as big a deal. We’ve read the real words and would most likely recognize if they were changed or missing. But in a world of only e-books and Bible apps, how do our grandchildren — or, worse, our great, great, great, great-grandchildren — have any guarantee that the Bible they’re reading is the one the original authors actually wrote?

For that matter, what happens if we reach the day when the Bible is only available in electronic form ... and the powers that be don’t approve of it at all?

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What You’re Guarding

In 2 Timothy, Paul exhorts us not only to “continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it” (2 Timothy 3:14), but to “guard the treasure that has been entrusted to you” (2 Timothy 1:14).

The treasure is in the form of a collection of inspired manuscripts we call the Bible. Ideas matter. And the ideas God wanted to be preserved are expressed in the words the original authors wrote down. That’s the only standard that should concern us.

Pithiness, convenience, and cultural acceptability have no bearing on the message God meant to convey through Scripture. And that’s why, no matter how many ways we find to do it, digitizing the Bible is a bad idea.

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The recent flooding in central Texas that devastated the area and killed over a hundred people, including 27 innocent young girls at a Christian campground, is a perfect example of the most difficult topic any defender of Christianity has to deal with. As a skeptical/atheist long-time friend of mine put it to me very directly, “This tells me several things: God is not all powerful, or he is all powerful and doesn’t give a s___, or he doesn’t exist.”

What do we say to that?

It’s a hard charge to answer. But it’s vitally important to keep a central point in mind when you do: The atheist also has to explain it.

I’ll get to that in a bit. But first, my response, which I’ll break into three parts:

1. How do you define evil?

2. Why would a good God allow evil?

3. How does your worldview deal with evil?

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What is Evil?

No one is denying that evil, injustice, pain, and suffering exist in the world. But regardless of your worldview, it must offer a consistent explanation for what those things are, where they come from, and how they fit into your view of reality.

The most reasonable worldview wins.

The so-called “Problem of Evil” is the number one argument you will ever hear against the existence of a loving God. But before you try to take it on, you have to remember a very important point:

Evil can only exist if good exists first.

For some reason, this concept doesn’t seem to occur to people. But the simple fact is, you can’t identify something as evil without having a standard to measure it by. And that means we need an explanation for the origin of good.

Frank Turek explains it with the analogy of a rusty car. You can have a car without rust, but you can’t have a rusty car without having the car first. Rust doesn’t exist on its own. It’s a privation — a corruption — of the way the car should be.

Likewise, evil exists only as a privation of goodness. It’s a corruption of the way things ought to be. And Christianity has a perfectly logical explanation for what we recognize as evil in the world. The standard of goodness to which we compare it is the perfect goodness of God’s character.

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The Free Will Defense

The most logical response to the challenge of the problem of evil is simple to understand. It is that God wants the beings he created to love and obey him. Pre-programmed robots can’t do that. For their love and obedience to be meaningful, God had to allow the possibility that we could choose otherwise.

So, he gave us free will.

Having free will entails that we have the capacity to make bad choices. All humans do it all the time. Evil is the result of those choices.

Just like you can’t define evil without good, you can’t choose evil without free will.

Christianity’s Unique Explanation

With a proper view of what evil is and where it comes from, it’s essential to understand Christianity’s unique explanation for it all.

First, Christianity describes the world precisely as it is. This includes a perfectly good God as the objective standard by which we compare things, and then define as evil those things that fall short of this standard. And it predicts that humans will use their free will to violate God’s perfect standard. This is what the Bible refers to as sin.

Second, it allows for the possibility that there are reasons that God may have made the world this way.

• Suffering challenges those who witness it to show compassion for those who suffer.

• Poverty leads us to recognize the emptiness of worldly pleasures and pleads with us to be charitable to those who are less fortunate.

• Fear teaches us to be courageous.

• Sickness reveals how dependent we are … and how fragile life is.

• Loneliness forces us to realize that we are not the center of the universe.

In short, a good God may allow evil things to happen for a greater purpose. That purpose could be that we recognize the perfect goodness of God and are drawn to know Him. As painful as suffering is to experience, there may be a morally justifiable reason for it.

Finally, Christianity is the only religion in which the deity not only recognizes pain and suffering and offers comfort when we experience it … but that he experiences it himself. The God of Christianity knows what suffering is. He willingly takes on human form and suffers with us. No other religion can even begin to countenance such a concept.

So, when it comes to evil and suffering, Christianity explains their origins and gives a rational explanation for why they exist.

What does atheism have to offer?

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Complaints About Nothing

The existence of good and evil is evident to all of us. Every human being experiences both. That’s why we complain about it. It’s a real thing that impacts real life in ways we all wish we could avoid.

But when an atheist complains about all the evil in the world — or denies God’s existence because of it — he hasn’t done anything to explain where it came from. He certainly hasn’t offered a solution to the “problem” he’s complaining about.

That’s the catch. Everyone sees evil as a problem. But Christianity has an explanation for it.

Atheism’s got nothing.

In fact, according to the atheistic worldview, there is no such thing as good or evil. That’s not just my opinion. I’ll let atheism speak for itself.

The “Pitiless Indifference” of Atheism

The blogger Wintery Knight offers some fantastic examples of how atheists shoot themselves in the foot on this topic. Here are a few excerpts:

Jerry Coyne

In atheist evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne’s editorial in USA Today, “You Don’t Really Have Free Will,” he opines about the fact that we are nothing but moist robots who only have the illusion of free will.

“Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output. Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject “decides” to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity [up to 7 seconds in advance]. “Decisions” made like that aren’t conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think we’ve made them, then we don’t have free will in any meaningful sense.”

In Jerry Coyne’s world, we don’t really “decide” anything. So, there is no way to distinguish between good and evil — no way even to make sense of ethical choices and their consequences.

William Provine

A historian of science, evolutionary biology, and population genetics, William Provine was well known for his passionate defense of atheism. Provine died in 2015, but this video (transcript below) represents his stance.

“Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposive (goal-directed) forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s going to be the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either. What an unintelligible idea!”

You have to give Dr. Provine this — he was honest about the implications of his worldview.

Richard Dawkins

Then, there’s the infamous Richard Dawkins, the de facto ringleader of the “New Atheists.” In one of his early books, The River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995), Dawkins is also candid about where his atheism leads:

“In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference … DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”

The conclusion is simple but profound. An honest atheist’s worldview has no way to define anything as good. It can say what “is,” but it can’t know what “ought” to be. And that means it also has no basis from which it can complain about the problem of evil.

The Atheist Solution

With that kind of thinking, what does the atheist say to the parents of the little girls who were washed away in Texas?

“Sorry about your luck.”

“Wrong place, wrong time, I guess.”

“Well, you know, there is this thing called survival of the fittest.”

Very few atheists are courageous enough to admit this. Instead, they’ll drone on about how humans evolved to form cooperative communities, seek mutually beneficial solutions, or seek to maximize “human flourishing.”

Don’t be fooled. Ask why cooperation is good. Ask what they mean by “beneficial.” Tell them to define “flourishing.” When they respond, pay attention to their answers. Then, point out that every explanation they’ve offered depends on defining some outcomes as “better” than others.

How so?

What they’re doing is using an objective standard of good that their worldview doesn’t allow for. They’re stealing from God while they claim he doesn’t exist.

The truth is that an honest atheist has nothing meaningful to say about any of it.

Before the Whirlwind Hits

None of this is easy to deal with in the moment. No matter how rational our position is, seeing a group of little girls washed away in a flood is sickening and seems pointless. And no one wants to hear your step-by-step approach to the problem of evil and suffering while the rain is still coming down. At that point, the only thing we should offer is compassion, heartfelt sympathy, and tangible support.

We should be listening, not talking.

That’s why we need to think through these kinds of issues before the storm approaches. Too many Christians are intimidated and flummoxed by the challenge of the problem of evil. They cower in its presence, afraid that it undermines everything they claim to believe in. At best, they accept the fact that it renders God impotent. At worst, it seems to negate his very existence.

Don’t buy it.

The existence of evil is the most powerful argument we have that God does exist. He is the perfect standard of good, the basis for any attempt to deal with the most obvious thing about the world in which we find ourselves. Not only that, but the Christian worldview also provides a way to understand and respond to evil. This is just another example of how Christianity offers the best answers to life’s most pressing questions.

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If Christianity is true, it should apply to every aspect of life. That means Christians should be able to engage in discussions about even the most difficult topics and have something relevant to say. Almost nothing tests that truism like the prospect of waging war. Recent news about U.S. involvement in the Middle East presents an excellent test of the relevance of a Christian-based ethic to that topic.

I have written about Just War Theory in the Christian Research Journal before (here and here). But the recent bombing of Iran and the associated conflict in that region bring the questions serious Christians should be asking themselves back to the forefront.

How do we apply the Christian worldview to what we’ve witnessed going on in the Middle East right now?

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Defining Just War Theory

St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were two of the most influential thinkers in the history of Christian theological and philosophical thought, and they are the primary architects of just war theory (JWT). It has been modified over the centuries, but JWT can be summarized as falling into three areas: (1) The reasons that would validate a nation entering into war (jus ad bellum); (2) The ethical considerations for how to conduct war once engaged in it (jus in bellum); and (3) The moral obligations for actions taken once the war is over (jus post bellum).

The justifiable reasons for going to war — jus ad bellum — must be based on a morally defensible cause. Self-defense against aggression or securing the human rights of innocents whose lives are imminently threatened are good examples of righteous causes. But the decision to go to war can only be made by a legitimate authority or governing body that does so with the right intention of establishing peace. The motivation cannot simply be the pursuit of selfish gain or revenge. Force should only be used as a last resort, and that force must be proportional to the severity of the threat. In short, war should not be entered into casually and must also include a reasonable expectation of success.

While fighting a war (jus in bellum), the focus is on the pursuit of human rights and ethical standards of conduct. It includes minimizing suffering to the greatest extent possible and demands that civilians and non-combatants should be immune from deliberate targeting.

Finally, jus post bellum focuses on the pursuit of a just and lasting peace in the aftermath of war. It includes identifying the root causes of the conflict and how they can be reconciled in its aftermath.

Ultimately, JWT acknowledges that war may be the only viable remedy for the evil intentions and actions of belligerents. But it also demands that the goal should always be a peaceful and lasting resolution.

Applying Just War Theory

Just war ethicists have argued about these issues for centuries. Their discussions have led to conclusions that span the spectrum from the demand for absolute pacifism to the view that, in some cases, going to war is the only morally justifiable position. JWT was developed because the nature of war inevitably brings objective moral principles into conflict.

We are bound by the objective moral duty to value and protect human life — an obligation that always requires us to differentiate between indiscriminate killing and justified violence. While the pacifist impulse should always appeal to our moral sensibilities, JWT attempts to identify what constitutes morally legitimate exceptions to the use of force.

My goal here is neither political nor religious. Except for the religious motivations held by the combatants, I exclude religion and politics from my analysis. In other words, I don’t blame Islam for religious reasons; I blame cold-blooded killers for human reasons. I am simply doing my best to apply an objective look at JWT to what we’ve seen going on in the Middle East. This includes the actions of Hamas/Hezbollah, Israel, Iran, and the United States.

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Arab Terrorism

The main perpetrators of violence and war in the Middle East today are Hamas, Hezbollah, and their funding source, Iran. The connections and history of these three are too complicated to detail here, but a quick summary is as follows:

Hamas

Hamas is actually an acronym for the “Islamic Resistance Movement,” a political organization of Palestinian Nationalist Sunni Islamists that had its origins in the Muslim Brotherhood. The group was founded in 1987 by Ahmed Yassim, won political control over the Gaza Strip in 2006, and seized control of Gaza in 2007 through a civil war during the Battle of Gaza. Ironically, Israel secretly funded Hamas at that time because it saw it as a better option than the PLO, with whom it had been fighting for decades.

Hamas won the 2006 election by promising a “corruption-free” government. But that government immediately began using foreign aid from mostly Sunni Muslim countries (like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and the UAE) — and from Great Britain, Germany, Italy, France, and even the U.S. — to fund its military budget instead of aiding its poverty-stricken people. It’s a long, sad story, but Hamas’ methods include:

• Building an underground network of tunnels and storage facilities to house its combat personnel, rockets, and military equipment.

• Launching hundreds of rockets at the civilian population of Israel.

• Deploying suicide bombers to attack Israeli civilian targets.

• Basing its military personnel and assets inside civilian locations like hospitals, schools, and mosques.

Hezbollah

Hezbollah has a similar background. Initially funded by Shia Muslims in Iran, Hezbollah emerged in Lebanon in 1982 as a reaction to an Israeli incursion into that country as well as to the unrepresented minority status of the Shia in the Lebanese government. One of the group’s first acts was the truck bomb attack on the Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in October 1983 that killed 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French soldiers. One of those Marines was a classmate and friend of mine from the U.S. Naval Academy, Dave Nairn.

Hezbollah’s methods and practices parallel those of Hamas.

• Stockpiling of over 100,000 missiles, many of which have been launched into Israel over the years.

• Amassing an army of an estimated 60,000 soldiers.

• Engaging in attacks on civilian targets, embassies, and airliners.

• Plotting and carrying out assassinations all over the world.

Asymmetric Warfare

The key to summarizing all this is that both Hamas and Hezbollah are paramilitary organizations that share the same goals:

• An Islamic Revolution.

• The establishment of a worldwide Muslim ummah — a Quran-based, theocratic, worldwide community.

• The dehumanization and killing of the Jews.

• The obliteration of the nation of Israel.

To achieve their goals, these groups engage in what is known as “asymmetric warfare” — violence perpetrated by small groups of combatants who share an ideology but not a government or a nation. That is what makes it challenging to apply JWT to these types of conflicts. JWT was built to work for morally accountable governments or nation-states, not terrorist groups.

By their very nature, terrorist attacks made by groups like Hamas and Hezbollah violate almost every tenet of JWT. Their purposes are vengeful. Their targets are often non-combatant civilians. And they have no intention of seeking a “just and lasting peace.” They’re out for blood, chaos, and annihilation.

There is no better example of this than the Hamas attack on innocent concert-goers in Israel on October 7, 2023. And the immoral nature of that attack also makes it difficult to assess the Israeli response.

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Israel

Israel’s response to the unjust attack on its civilian population on October 7th was two-fold: 1) to stop the aggressors’ continuing attack on their people, and 2) to mitigate the asymmetric imbalance in moral accountability by decapitating the Hamas leadership.

The initial Israeli response was perfectly acceptable under JWT. It was an act of self-defense. But, in my opinion, those actions quickly exceeded the moral boundaries of a just war. They became disproportionate and have led to levels of civilian casualties and deaths that I do not believe are defensible within JWT.

I type those words with trepidation because I am aware of the circumstances within which Israel had to act. Hamas was holding hostages and cowardly hiding its combatants inside civilian locations. There is no doubt they did this to take advantage of what they knew to be Israel’s higher moral calculus.

Hamas blatantly disregards just war principles. But they knew Israel would be obligated to honor them.

Unfortunately, Israel didn’t do that to the extent they could have. For instance, during the initial attack, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) gave civilians a 24-hour warning to evacuate southern Gaza. However, 24 hours is not a realistic timeframe for more than a million people to exit an area that is that congested.

The IDF also employs “roof knocking” (dropping harmless, noise-making munitions on rooftops) or calls/texts civilians to warn them to evacuate buildings. Roof knocking can go unheard or be confusing. But even if some of these methods are successful at getting people to leave a building, the Israelis’ use of high-yield weapons often creates widespread damage that evacuees cannot escape, especially in densely populated urban areas.

All told, an estimate of the minimum number of civilian deaths due to Israeli attacks appears to be about 54 civilians for every 100 attacks. This is a low-end estimate; the real number is probably much higher. By comparison, when the U.S. attacked ISIS fighters in a similar kind of urban area in Raqqa, Syria, in 2017, the estimated rate was between 1.7 and 7.0 civilian deaths per 100 attacks.

Do the math.

Yes, I realize that Hamas purposefully puts civilians in harm’s way. And, yes, Hamas lies about the civilian death toll. But these estimates are based on independent data. So, by any reasonable comparison, the civilian death rate in Gaza vastly exceeds not only what has been historically obtainable, but anything that JWT would allow.

In short, I believe Israel has overplayed its hand and, by doing so, lost the moral high ground.

I realize this is an unpopular stance to take with some. But those of us who claim to be beholden to the proper conduct of war must abide by JWT even when it puts us at a disadvantage. Otherwise, JWT is nothing but another exercise in meaningless academic navel-gazing.

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Iran

Behind this entire sordid catastrophe lies the diabolical Islamic “Republic” of Iran. And by that, I mean the morally bankrupt theocratic leadership of that nation. This is not about the Iranian people — the Persians, as they like to be called. These are human beings made in the image of God, just like all of us.

Neither is this about the religion of Islam. The Persians should be free to practice their religion just like us, no matter how false or corrupted I believe it to be.

What I am talking about is the radical Ayatollahs. I purposefully noted above that Hamas is a Sunni religious organization, while Hezbollah is Shiite. These two divisions within Islam are often at odds with one another, and many times violently at odds. Iraq (then Sunni under Saddam Hussein) went to war with Iran (Shia) back in the 1980s for that very reason.

Yet Shiite Iran funds and arms both Hezbollah and Hamas for one reason — they share a mutual disdain for Israel and want to obliterate the Jewish people from the face of the Earth. It’s a liaison founded in hatred for Jews and that rejects any limits to what it can do to achieve that goal. It’s a regime that certainly cares nothing for JWT.

Actually, it’s even worse than that. The endgame of every Shiite Ayatollah is world domination. They share the view that the so-called “Twelfth Imam” lies hidden in waiting to oversee a future Islamic state that will rule the entire world. And they believe this Imam will emerge to bring peace through Islam when the world is plunged into chaos.

In other words, to them, world chaos sounds like a dreamy future.

Which brings us to the United States.

Bombing Iran

When seven B-2 bombers left Whiteman AFB in Missouri on June 21, 2025, en route to targets in Iran, anyone with a shred of respect for JWT should have been in a state of existential turmoil. Preemptive attacks are very difficult to justify under JWT for one simple reason — going to war is supposed to be a “last resort.”

For that reason, I tread lightly here again. We have been fed intelligence reports in the past (see: “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and the Iraq War in 2003) that were used to justify wars that turned out not only to be started on false premises, but that also became poorly thought-out conflicts that led to disastrous consequences for America, its warfighters, and the people of the other countries involved.

In this case, the intelligence that was reported was that Iran was “very close” to obtaining a nuclear weapon. If that is true (big “if”) — and with all of the above as background — this may be a rare case where JWT does justify a preemptive strike.

The Iran-Hamas-Hezbollah axis is a cesspool of evil that is, and has been, wreaking havoc in the Middle East. Not only so, but the participants would like nothing better than to spread their chaos to the ends of the Earth. If Iran were to obtain a nuclear capability, the threat to any hope for peace in that region — or around the world — would disintegrate.

With all that said, when assessing the decision to launch that mission from a JWT standpoint, it falls well within the boundaries of a morally justifiable preemptive attack based on the following;

• The action was meant to avoid a greater threat to millions of human beings.

• The action was limited to nuclear facility enrichment and production sites. To the best of our knowledge, there were zero human casualties.

• The action was limited in scope and location.

• The president specifically stated that we have nothing but love for the people of Iran.

• There is no indication that we will continue (as we have in the past) to pursue “regime change,” “nation-building,” insert ourselves into the internal politics of another nation, or put any American troops on the ground for any of those purposes.

If we find that the threat of a nuclear Iran was well-founded — and if all these things remain true — I believe the U.S. attack on Iran fits within the boundaries of just war doctrine. If not, anyone who claims to value JWT needs to stop what they’re doing and be honest with themselves. Do we honor the tenets of JWT or do we mock them?

The Ugly Thing

In 1848, the political philosopher John Stuart Mill, in his book The Principles of Political Economy, commented on the difficulty in assessing war for those who value liberty and peace.

Speaking as a father of five sons who have served, and who continue to serve, in the armed forces, there is nothing in this life I despise more than war. We should avoid it in every way possible. It should always be a last resort.

However, sometimes a proper view of morality dictates that pacifism is not the proper solution. Sometimes, the good guys need to stop evil in its tracks. God instituted governments for that purpose.

“… whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.”

Romans 13:2-4

When those times come, we are duty-bound to take the principles of Just War — and the objective morality on which it stands — seriously.

There are some things worth going to war for, but they are few and far between. And when we face them, we owe it to those who will suffer war’s consequences to know we are doing it for the right reasons.

God help us if we’re not.

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Applicable Resources

Michael McKenzie, “Just War Tradition,” Christian Research Journal 19 (Fall 1996), 10–17 (available at http://www.equip.org/articles/just-war-tradition/)

James A. Borland, “A Nation Responds to Terrorism and War,” Christian Research Journal 24 (2002): 32–41 (available at http://www.equip.org/articles/a-nation-responds-to-terrorism-and-war/.

“You can’t put God in a box!” It’s a popular saying within the Christian community. And it seems reasonable to say. After all, God can do anything he wants to do. Who would question that?

I submit that every thinking Christian should question that ... because it’s not true. The elements of God’s character do put him in a box. And our failure to recognize that can create a false — and therefore dangerous — picture of God that can lead us and others astray. In fact, God put himself in a box, and we are obliged to keep him there.

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God Cannot Do Whatever He Wants To Do

There is an element of truth to the oft-repeated “You-can’t-put-God-in-a-box” mantra. Many times, what we mean when we say that is that God can do miracles or manipulate circumstances in any way he desires. Put that way, there is no reason to argue against it. God has done miraculous things that mere humans could have never imagined possible. And he still can. That’s who God is.

But saying that is different than saying that God can do whatever he wants to do. If you think that sounds sacrilegious, you first have to understand that God cannot do things that are contrary to his nature. Before we can determine if God can do anything he wants to do, we first have to understand what that nature is. There are several elements to God’s nature, and it’s important to know them so we don’t fall into the trap of viewing God in the wrong way. Here are a few to consider …

God is Logical

God made an orderly universe. He built the laws of logic into our world and made it predictable. This is why we can communicate with one another. It’s why we can use science to understand how the world works. If the laws of logic govern the universe, they must have come from a logical source. Since God made the universe that way, it means he must also be a logical, rational being.

Logic is an extension of God’s character. It means that God cannot do illogical things. He can’t make a square circle, a married bachelor, or “a rock so big he can’t lift it.” Those are silly examples, but the point is critical. God is the source of logic in our world. But he is also bound by logic himself. And that means the various aspects of his character cannot contradict one another.

The human failure to realize that one simple fact has been the source of many moral failures and false religions.

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God is Omnipotent

God is all-powerful. But having supreme power doesn’t mean God can do anything. It means he can do anything that power can do. Being immeasurably powerful is what allows God to do miracles or create a universe as immense and complex as the one we see around us. But power does not allow God to do illogical, sinful, hateful, or unjust things. That’s an important distinction to make.

God is Omnibenevolent

It’s a fancy word, but all it means is that God is pure goodness. He is “the final standard of good, and all that God is and does is worthy of approval.” Because he is good, God is willing and able to demonstrate love in all its forms through mercy, patience, and grace. God loves everything he created. And since human beings are the pinnacle of that creation, God loves humanity in a way that we are incapable of comprehending.

But that goodness doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

God is Just

Justice means getting what you deserve. This can be positive or negative. If you do work for someone, for instance, justice requires that you are rewarded based on the agreement you made with that person for payment. Likewise, evil acts deserve punishment. We all recognize this intuitively. No one has to teach this to us. Even little babies demonstrate that they know it.

All of us inherently value and seek justice. God is the source and embodiment of that idea. His character demands it. And since his character is morally perfect, any act of rebellion against that moral perfection, no matter how seemingly small or insignificant, deserves to be punished.

In other words, the goodness of God demands that he punish evil.

God is Eternal and Self-Existent

The fact that anything exists at all means there must be not only an original cause for its coming into being, but also a permanent, unmovable foundation that sustains it at all times. That’s God. He is Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” and the foundation for all existence. He is not bound by time; he created it.

This is why the common question, “Who made God?” is so silly. God is not “contingent.” This means that he doesn’t rely on anything or anyone else for his existence. He upholds all reality at every instant but does not need to be upheld himself.

God is Omnipresent

The fact that God upholds all reality at every instant means that he is present everywhere, always.

God is not limited by time or space. This doesn’t mean that he is everything. That’s pantheism, the foundation of many New Age and Eastern monistic religions. Nor is he in everything. That’s panentheism, a favorite of the New Thought progressives.

God's omnipresence simply means that he is present everywhere in his creation, but also distinct from it. You and I can be present in a room but not be part of the room. In the same way, God can be present in every room but not a part of those rooms.

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Putting Them All Together

There are plenty of other character traits that theologians use to describe God. If you are interested in digging more deeply into these kinds of topics, I suggest investing in a book on Systematic Theology. But considering the definitions I’ve briefly mentioned here, I doubt that anyone who takes God seriously would find them to be controversial in themselves.

Our problems arise when we forget that God exhibits all these character traits simultaneously. All facets of his nature have to work together. He can’t exercise one if it violates another. Our failure to understand that is what can get us in trouble.

Theological Inconsistencies

Focusing on one aspect of God while ignoring another invites us to accept a false view of him. This is the case with false religions and cults. Most religions recognize that some kind of God exists, but instead of acknowledging the kind of God he is, they redefine him based on their own desires or preferences, while ignoring the things he’s made very clear.

For instance, the pantheists corrupt his omnipresence by taking it too far. Instead of seeing him present throughout the creation, they believe God is part of it. As a result, they end up worshipping created things instead of the Spirit who created them.

These kinds of errors are easy to spot. But my point here is to show that many Christians unwittingly do similar things — and they sometimes do them when they’re trying to “not put God in a box.” They may do so for noble reasons, but their errors can still lead to misunderstandings about who God really is.

Here are a few examples:

“God showed up!”

When they have an emotional experience in worship, it is common to hear Christians proclaim that “God really showed up in worship today!” But God doesn’t “show up” anywhere. Remember, he’s omnipresent. The fact that you may be overwhelmed with awe by the glory of God in some way says something about you, not him. Having an emotional experience during worship (or any other time) doesn’t mean that God suddenly decided to grace you with his presence.

He’s been there all the time.

Don’t confuse the issue. God doesn’t need our praise. And he isn’t diminished if we don’t give him praise. We need to praise him to remind ourselves of our dependence on him. He doesn’t show up to make us feel good. This simple realization can radically transform your view of worship from being something you experience into the basis for defining your lifestyle.

“God is so good!”

This is a common refrain to hear from someone who has just received good news of some kind. And while it’s great to acknowledge God’s blessings, it’s wrong to acknowledge them only when things are going our way.

The truth is that God is good regardless of our personal circumstances.

It’s easy to express our love for him when things are going well for us. But it’s imperative that we do the same when things are going badly — maybe more so. It may feel good to recognize him in the good things we experience, but remember he is with you through the bad things, too.

“Where was God when ... ?”

On the flip side, we seem to think God has gone missing when catastrophes occur. We assume that God’s omnipotence means he can and should destroy evil forever. But God made the loving decision to create us as free-will beings. He willingly limits his power to allow us to choose to follow him. And that means that no matter how powerful he is, God has created a world that gives us the option to make bad choices.

It turns out we humans are pretty good at doing just that.

The moral evil we witness all around us depends on our actions, not on the absence of God.

“God is love.”

This is absolutely true, but it is also the one character trait of God that is the easiest and most frequently abused. Maybe you’ve heard it said another way: “Love wins!” This is the favorite interpretation of those who believe that God’s love for them means he will accept them for who they are, and that he wants them to be “happy.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

At the tip of this cultural iceberg is the idea that God is just fine with all our sexual choices and preferences. But that’s not the case, and it’s not just because believers are “prudes.” It’s because God clearly defined the boundaries of sex as being solely within the covenant of natural marriage. Anything outside of that violates his moral law, and he’s not fine with any violation of his moral law — even if we claim it makes us “happy.”

Remember that God is not just love; he is also perfectly just. If you let God’s love into the box you’re defining for him, but don’t acknowledge that his justice needs to be in the box too, you end up with an incomplete — and I would say dangerous — view of a God. That’s because a “loving God” who only wants to see you “happy” always seems to morph into a god who looks just like the person you see in the bathroom mirror every morning.

The idea that “God is love” is true as far as it goes. But his ultimate goodness and love are different ways of describing God’s moral perfection. Being pure love and goodness means he cannot sin, and he cannot lie. His perfect justice means he cannot allow moral imperfection into his presence without consequence.

When our actions violate his moral law, his justice requires that there be consequences for our decisions. God’s loving character doesn’t allow him to accept whatever moral choices we make, just like it wouldn’t be “loving” for a parent to approve of anything their children did.

This is a reality that often gets ignored by the “universalists” who insist there is no such thing as Hell — that a loving God would never allow us to be separated from him. The fact that God loves us does not mean he condones anything we do. And the fact that we choose to separate ourselves from him proves that he loves us enough to let us have our way.

The bottom line is this. When you combine God’s moral perfection, omnibenevolence, and ultimate justice, you end up in a world where you cannot live up to his perfect moral standards. That means that you deserve punishment for your moral failures. But, because God is omnibenevolent and loving, he offers you a way out of that punishment by paying the price for your transgressions Himself.

That leaves you with yet another free-will choice.

You can face his justice … or you can accept his grace. But, no matter which one you pick, it does nothing to change the fact that God is love.

The Box God Needs To Be In

These are just a few examples of how our failure to keep God in the proper box leads not only to theological inconsistencies but to a corrupted view of reality itself. That’s what I mean when I say we must put God in a box. It’s a box defined by the total of all the elements of his character.

Isolating our favorite trait is a bad idea because it doesn’t tell the whole story. And, as is always the case, accepting bad ideas leads to dire real-world consequences.

It turns out that we’d better keep God in a box. And we better understand how that box is defined. It helps us avoid most of the silly, false, and even dangerous ideas that have become all too common among Christians these days.

What we can’t do is change the box in which God put himself. He made it that way for good reasons. His reasons. And we would all do well to keep him there.

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In my experience, the typical discussion of “spiritual warfare” centers on the stuff of the old Frank Peretti novels like This Present Darkness or Piercing the Darkness. It’s all about gargoyle-looking demons snarling on our shoulders, power plays, and satanic influences. But the whole “the-devil-made-me-do-it” thing has always seemed over-the-top to me. For that reason, it’s a subject I have mostly ignored. It certainly never seemed to have much to do with the things I like to discuss here -- arguments and evidence. But it turns out there is a direct connection between apologetics and spiritual warfare. And all of us need to understand what it is.

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The Balanced View

As usual, C. S. Lewis encourages us to consider a more reasonable view of spiritual warfare than the one we usually hear:

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”

~ C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Balance is always good. And if you want an introduction to that view of spiritual warfare, there is no more entertaining way to get it than reading C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. The gist of the book is that Screwtape is a senior demon training his understudy, Wormwood, on how to best mess with humans. The book is a record of their dialogue. It’s a training manual for spiritual warfare -- from the bad guys’ point of view.

Lewis said it was the most challenging book he ever wrote because it forced him to think backward. God is the “enemy.” Promoting evil is Screwtape’s mission. I’ve always enjoyed Lewis’s unique approach. And, I’ve come to see spiritual warfare in an even more pragmatic way.

Close Encounters of a Different Kind

In lesson two of his 8-part course, The Bible Fast Forward, Greg Koukl gives a fantastic insight about this. He points out that much of the emphasis in the church on spiritual warfare has been on engaging in power encounters. We talk about binding, loosing, and casting out demons with specific kinds of prayers. Much like Frank Peretti, we focus on methods we can use to counteract the evil enterprises of the enemy. But, Koukl says, Scripture suggests something different. His point is that the essential character of spiritual warfare is not about power encounters with the devil.

Spiritual warfare is about truth encounters. It’s about opposing lies and deception.

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Paul’s Take on Warfare

In 2nd Corinthians 10:3-5, Paul addresses the issue this way:

“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

Then, in Ephesians 6, the most famously quoted Bible passage on the subject, Paul goes on to describe the fight:

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

But in the following plea, Paul doesn’t tell the Ephesians to pray against the rulers, authorities, and powers. Instead, he tells them to pray for perseverance. He asks them to pray that he and those around him might speak the truth fearlessly.

Do you see the difference?

The Battlefield of Ideas

The weapons of spiritual warfare are thoughts. The battlefield is in our minds. And that means that those of us who defend the faith are living at the forward edge of the battle area.

The battlefield is not just a place to argue about the existence of God, the design of the universe, or the reliability of Scripture. It’s also a place to fight for the essence of truth itself.

Think about it. Normal, rationally thinking human beings could never come up with some of the ideas our culture accepts without question. Those who argue in favor of the corruption of human sexuality — things like same-sex “marriage” or gender fluidity — aren’t just arguing about the moral nature of their conduct. Reasonable people could debate that kind of thing.

Instead, they are denying biological reality itself.

As Carl Trueman puts it in his book, The Rise & Triumph of the Modern Self, “many in our society [insist that] to deny it or question it in some way is to reveal oneself as stupid, immoral, or subject to yet another irrational phobia.”* In other words, the culture holds in contempt anyone who claims to see reality for what it actually is.

We have arrived at the place George Orwell warned about 100 years ago: “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

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Not Just A Cultural Trend

Human sexuality is at the epicenter of the cultural battles that are raging around the topics of truth and reality. But it’s not the only issue.

Society has also accepted without argument the idea that science will solve all our problems. This philosophical view is called “Scientism.” It’s based on the notion that science and faith are in a perpetual state of war. But, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, that is a lie. Science and theology are complementary ways of knowing things about the world. They are mutually reinforcing allies in the ongoing battle for the truth.

Likewise, those who foment hatred in our society do so by disingenuously politicizing the news. They do it using incidents of racism, oppression, inequity, and exclusion. Surely, we can find blatant examples of abuse with each of these. No thinking person can deny it. But that doesn’t mean our entire society can be reduced to them.

Generalizations are never a good idea. You don’t define the whole by the abuses of outliers. But the really troubling thing about all these trends is that they are not just cultural phenomena. They are also infiltrating our churches under the banner of “Progressive Christianity” and “social justice.”

We should expect the world to turn things inside out and upside down. But when the church goes along with it, I don’t see any other way to explain it except as the consequence of spiritual warfare.

The “Social Justice” Deception

Back to C. S. Lewis. In one of his training sessions with Wormwood, the indomitable Screwtape broaches the topic of removing spirituality from a Christian’s life. His method may sound familiar:

“We want men to treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything – even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man first to value social justice as a thing which the enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice … it is quite easy to coax humans around this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that 'only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilizations.' … You see the little rift? ‘Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.’ That’s the game …” (emphases mine)

Remember, Lewis wrote those words in 1942. It turns out the battle for our minds hasn’t changed much over the years. Screwtape’s minions have been wildly successful in deceiving the world. Our challenges as defenders of the faith are complicated, but they’re not new. When it comes right down to it, they’re as old as the Garden of Eden.

A Reason For Hope

When you see spiritual warfare this way, you realize it never stops. The battle of ideas will continue far into the future. We can’t escape the battle. But we can embrace a battle plan that refuses to surrender. As Rod Dreher put it in his fantastic book, Live Not By Lies: A Manual For Christian Dissidents,

“You have to live in a world of lies, but it's your choice as to whether that world lives in you.”

If you watch the news, this can all become very discouraging. But we don’t have time to be discouraged. Our charge is not just to give answers. It is to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope that you have…”

Hope.

In his book, The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton surveys the many forces that have threatened to destroy Christianity over the last 2000 years. “Time and again,” said Chesterton, “the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. But each time, it was the dog that died.”

Our faith and church have been under attack since the beginning of time. But the Bible and history are littered with examples of saints who persevered in the face of physical and spiritual warfare. Our time is unique in many ways, but from an eternal perspective, the mission is still the same.

Lies are still the enemy. The truth is still unchanging.

And that is the reason we have hope.

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• Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020), p. 19

Jesus of Nazareth died on a Roman cross and then was resurrected from the dead three days later. It’s not just a fairy tale. Christians believe that the Resurrection is a historical fact. It’s what sets Christianity apart from every other world religion. It is the foundation of the Christian faith. If it’s not true, the New Testament is fiction, Jesus is a fraud, and Christianity is a false religion. Anyone would be a fool to believe in it. This isn’t just my opinion. It’s the Apostle Paul’s:

1 Corinthians 15:12-19 — “... if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile ... [and you] are to be pitied more than all men.”

None of us wants to be foolish or pitied for our faith. And no one wants to follow — or encourage others to follow — a false religion. So what reasons do we have to believe this story? It turns out there are several.

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Impact Events

Just outside the cockpit door of every commercial airliner, there is a telephone handset that allows the flight attendants to talk to the pilots. And inside the cockpit of every commercial airliner is a “Door Unlock” switch on the center console that allows the pilots to open the cockpit door without getting out of their seats. If a flight attendant had knocked on my cockpit door at 8:45 AM on September 11, 2001, and asked me if she could come up front, I would have unlocked the door while I was still on the phone with her. I wouldn’t have hesitated for a second.

By 9:15 AM that same morning, the passengers of United Flight 93 had already figured out that was a bad idea. They were storming the cockpit of their Boeing 757 over southern Pennsylvania for that very reason. What changed during those thirty minutes?

We all know what changed. The collective mindset of the entire world changed. It’s called an “Impact Event” — an incident so shocking it has the power to change not just what we think but the way we think ... about everything.

Resurrection - The Cultural Backdrop

In the first century A.D., there were several different kinds of beliefs about life after death in the Egyptian and Greco-Roman worlds that surrounded Israel. The Egyptians mummified people with their stuff so they could use it in the afterlife. The Greeks and Romans believed in various forms of an underworld destination.

But no one anywhere believed in the idea of a bodily resurrection occurring after a person died. The Jews weren’t any different. Their views varied by theological sub-group.

The Essenes’ views were similar to those of their neighboring pagan cultures. They believed in a single-stage disembodied immortality — a “soul” that continued into an “afterlife.” Their view didn’t include any kind of bodily resurrection. The Sadducees did not believe in any kind of life after death at all. The Pharisees did believe in one form of “resurrection.” But theirs was a group event that they thought would occur for all of God’s people. The righteous would rise bodily together at the end of time.

Not Even In Myth

In other words, there were plenty of different ideas about what happened to people after they died. But the Jews and their pagan contemporaries agreed about one thing — that the idea of a bodily resurrection was complete rubbish.

“This basic tenet of human existence and experience is accepted as axiomatic throughout the ancient world; once people have gone by the road of death, they do not return. When the ancient classical world spoke of (and denied) resurrection, there should be no controversy about what the word and its cognates referred to ... ‘Resurrection’ was not one way of describing what death consisted of. It was a way of describing something everyone knew did not happen: the idea that death could be reversed, undone, could work backward. Not even in myth was it permitted.”

~ N. T. Wright, The Resurrection Of The Son Of God

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The New Paradigm

Then, suddenly, everything changed. Despite every commonly held belief to the contrary, one group of people began believing in a bodily resurrection. They were first-generation Christians. For some reason, a large group of these people turned on a dime. They started saying that a person could be resurrected. They claimed that someone had done just that. And they described a resurrected person as having some kind of weirdly transformed physical body. These Christians started using the term “resurrection” in ways they had never used the term before. They talked about it in the present tense.

The New Church

The idea of a resurrection had been a tangential doctrinal variant for the Jews. But, for some of them, it morphed overnight into the central tenet of their faith. Opinions about life after death had been all over the map. But suddenly, Christians were remarkably unanimous about one thing: The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. And that changed everything else.

Their Jewish religious and Temple worship rites weren’t exempt. They went from practicing animal sacrifice to preaching on Christ’s sacrifice. They claimed that the binding Law of Moses had been fulfilled and that baptism and communion had replaced circumcision as the symbol of their faith. They even changed their weekly day of worship from Saturday to Sunday. It was like the world had experienced some kind of cataclysmic Impact Event.

Because it had.

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The Resurrection is History

These rapid, sweeping changes in thinking and habits are documented in history. That is what makes Christianity so unique. It’s not just a “faith system” or a list of rules for healthy living. And it’s not a self-help program based on having a friendly relationship with God.

Christianity is based on an epic story. But the story is true.

It’s historically verifiable. And the central event in the story is the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

The truth of Christianity lives or dies (pun intended) on the Resurrection. If you want to falsify the Christian story, just prove that Jesus never rose from the dead. That is the point the Apostle Paul was making in 1 Corinthians 15. If the Resurrection of Jesus was not an actual, historical event, you can dismiss us Christians as fools. But if it was, you should bend your knee to the risen Messiah. As I’ve discussed many times, the definition of truth is “correspondence to reality.” Does what we believe about something match the way the world really is? If it does, that belief is true. And that means that if we believe the Resurrection is true, we should have solid historical evidence for it from the real world. Is there any?

You bet there is.

Evidence Please

The evidence doesn’t depend on your religious point of view. It’s the same kind of evidence mainstream historians use to evaluate any kind of historical event. You take the evidence you have and look for an explanation that takes all of it into account. The first bit of evidence is the New Testament itself. If you evaluate it in the same way you would evaluate any set of ancient documents, the conclusion is simple. The New Testament documents are historically reliable. This really isn’t even debatable. The evidence is overwhelming. But think about the origins of these documents. Who wrote them, and why?

The answer to both those questions is so obvious that it blows my mind that I, as a confessing Christian, missed it for decades. The New Testament was written by people whose lives were turned upside down by the Resurrection of Christ. Their writings weren’t just fanciful musings. The authors wrote down what they saw. And they wrote those things down because of the Resurrection.

So, we have highly reliable historical documents. And those documents record an Impact Event unlike any other. Billions of people have died throughout history. But the world has only reset its entire calendar system in honor of one life. That’s the ultimate kind of Impact Event. And it’s powerful evidence for the historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus.

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The Minimal Facts Approach

The New Testament writers experienced the Impact Event and wrote about what they saw. But they weren’t the only ones. Other historians witnessed the effects of the Resurrection, too. And their accounts corroborate the New Testament authors’ stories. For that reason, there are several elements of the story that even its critics admit are undeniable. These are mainstream historians who overwhelmingly agree with the veracity of five facts tied to the Resurrection.

Dr. Gary Habermas, a world-class PhD Bible scholar, calls these the “Minimal Facts.” And he has popularized an argument based on them. Here are the five central elements of the Resurrection account that even Christianity’s opponents admit are historically accurate:

1. Jesus of Nazareth died by crucifixion on a Roman cross.

2. Jesus’ disciples believed that he appeared to them after he had died.

3. Paul, the church persecutor and sworn enemy of Christianity, was suddenly changed into its greatest advocate.

4. James, the brother of Jesus, suddenly dropped his skepticism and became the leader of the Jerusalem church.

5. The tomb where they buried Jesus on Friday was empty on Sunday.

Since there is overwhelming agreement to these, Habermas’s “Minimal Facts Approach” simply says that the conclusion we draw about the Resurrection must be based on an “inference to the best explanation” for all these facts.

I’m not going to get into the details of each right now, but here’s the point: The only all-encompassing explanation for all five of these facts is that the Resurrection actually occurred.

A Reason To Believe

The New Testament writers penned their manuscripts for a reason. They believed that something cataclysmic had happened. And it doesn’t make sense to say they conspired to concoct the story. Every single one of them went to his grave without recanting the story they shared. Most of them were executed for that very reason.

It strains credulity to say they were willing to suffer and die in defense of a story they knew they had made up. Taking all this into account, it is perfectly reasonable to say the Resurrection is a historical fact. If you can say that about any historical event, you can say it about this one. And yes, that means a miracle occurred.

So, those who deny that miracles are possible can’t just dismiss the Resurrection as being “religious.” Of course, it’s religious. But it’s also historical. The evidence is clear. They can doubt all historical claims. Or they can be reasonable and rethink the presuppositions that led them to reject miracles in the first place.

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Here is a short summary of some of the “Minimal Facts” about the resurrection. There is plenty of evidence to support each one of these facts:

Many contemporary Christians are reluctant to speak the truth. They have accepted the notion that truth is divisive and that claiming to know the truth is arrogant. They want to be inclusive, show love, and be compassionate. That’s all great. But, in the meantime, the truth of the Gospel is dying in the streets. If you’re a Christian concerned about marginalizing those who don’t accept the truth through your words, you won’t be left with much to say. And some Christian “leaders” think that’s a good thing.

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Meet Richard Rohr

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest -- a modern-day Christian mystic who teaches “contemplation ... self-emptying ... and radical compassion, particularly for the socially marginalized.” Because he calls us to be compassionate, Rohr has become the “go-to guy” for presenting the story of Christianity to the world around us. That’s a subject for another time. But I bring him up because I saw him quoted as saying the following:

Jesus is asked over 183 questions in the Gospels and only answers 3 of them. We are not meant to be answer givers.

~ Richard Rohr

Someone shared the quote on Facebook and I was amazed by how many people were enamored with its wisdom and relevance. So, I joined in the conversation to discuss the quote’s legitimacy. I asked why someone would consider the quote so wonderful ... but no one would give me an answer. Apparently, they really weren’t meant to be answer-givers.

Always Be Prepared To Give An Answer

Richard Rohr defends panentheism and “the Universal Christ” — both views that stand in direct opposition to historic Christianity. He’s been called the “Pope” of Progressive Christianity. That’s all bad enough, and more than I care to get into here. But I am more than happy to address the notion that Christians are not to be “answer givers.” That’s indefensible. It stands in complete opposition to what the Bible actually says in 1 Peter 3:15 ...

“always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.”

Not only does Rohr’s aphorism fly in the face of what the Bible says, but it also denies what Jesus and the Apostles actually did.

When Jesus gave them the Great Commission in Matthew 28, they carried it out. They went all over the world and preached the Gospel. Paul himself made it a point to “reason with them from the Scriptures” in every town he entered. He debated the professional philosophers in Athens and the religious leaders in the backwater towns of Galatia. He got beaten up and left for dead because of it. You don’t get beaten up unless you’re giving answers somebody doesn’t want to hear.

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Invoking St. Francis

Richard Rohr’s quip is a reflection of a trend that has become popular within the church at large. We seem to think that getting along with others is preferable to telling the truth. Many who promote this idea do so by attributing this kind of thinking to St. Francis of Assisi. They like to offer this as his most famous saying:

“Preach the gospel always, if necessary, use words.”

You can see this little aphorism repeated everywhere, and it sounds pretty cool. Plenty of well-meaning Christians use it to emphasize that actions speak louder than words. Like Richard Rohr, they even seem to imply that talking the talk may be detrimental to the cause. “Keep your mouth shut,” the quip seems to tell us, “and just walk the walk.”

On one level, there is no arguing with this simple fact. I have written elsewhere about the idea that “who you are speaks so loudly that no one hears what you say.” We certainly don’t want the life we lead to deny everything we claim to represent. We can, in fact, diminish the message to insignificance by our own hypocrisy.

But does that mean the reverse is true? Can we proclaim the message through our actions alone?

A Message Without Words?

Here’s the problem: the Good News (a.k.a. the Gospel) is a propositional truth claim about the nature of the world, the nature of man, and the remedy for man’s rebellion against God. It’s a story about how God created us, how we rebelled against him, and his personal offer to redeem us. It’s a story about reality.

No one has to accept it. But it’s only “good news” if it’s actually true. So here is my question: How can we relay such a message and explain its implications without using words?

We can’t.

There is no denying that our actions should represent the truth of the Gospel message. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is a message that needs pronouncement.

Misquoting St. Francis

I honestly don’t know the context of St. Francis’s quip. But I find it hard to believe that a thinker like him meant it in the way contemporary Christians use it. A little research confirms this. For starters, we have the quote wrong! What Francis actually said was:

“Preach the Gospel always and when necessary use words.”

Notice that St. Francis himself did not render preaching of the gospel as a contingent option. He didn’t separate it from the act of living it out. Contrary to the popular version of his quote, he didn’t say, “if necessary.” He said, “When necessary.”

Francis linked the preaching and the actions directly together. We are the ones who have attributed an improper context to his words. I find it ironic that Francis of Assisi founded the Franciscan Order to which Richard Rohr belongs. And it turns out Rohr is misapplying St. Francis’ words.

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Francis of Assisi Used Words

It is also interesting that Francis of Assisi (birth name: Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone) devoted himself to the kind of life for which he is now known ... after being convicted by a sermon he heard in 1209.

Francis committed himself to a life of poverty. He felt connected to nature and the beauty of the creation. He felt empathy for others. But all these were rooted in a sense of community and shared redemption that he learned through study and experience. In fact, St. Francis himself was known for the powerful sermons he delivered. He lived out the Gospel, and he told others about it with his words.

Apparently, St. Francis of Assisi would not have been a fan of Richard Rohr’s prohibition against being “answer givers.” He not only asked lots of questions, he answered quite a few himself.

Please, Give Them Answers

It is fashionable these days to label those who defend the gospel with logic, philosophy, and confidence as being arrogant. But let’s not over-spiritualize or look down our collective noses at the relevancy of proclaiming the truth. Preaching the gospel and living out the gospel are not mutually exclusive projects.

Our choice is not an “either/or” dilemma. We have a duty to do both. One has to wonder how in the world anyone could have read the Bible and come to the conclusion that we shouldn’t be “answer givers.”

The reality is that the post-Christian, post-truth world we live in demands that we demonstrate grace, but also that we deliver the truth. And that includes giving answers. Proclaim the Gospel with your life, please. But, while you’re at it, use words and answer questions.

The world is watching, but it’s listening too.

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If you were looking for a completely trustworthy Christian apologist to follow, would you pick someone who had risen to the status of global celebrity because of his unparalleled ability to articulate the Gospel? Or would you gravitate toward someone who is a well-documented and self-confessed psychopath? The best choice is not as obvious as it might at first seem. In this case, I’d pick the psychopath. And I say that based on the advice of ... the psychopath. But if that sounds strange to you, keep reading.

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Recently, I began facilitating a 13-week Christian Worldview course that is nearly 20 years old. The Truth Project is a fantastic overview of biblical teaching and how we can think about applying it to the world we live in. It offers a compelling and systematic picture of how the biblical worldview fits together.

I have presented this course several times but it’s been several years since I did so. That’s why I had completely forgotten about one aspect of the course that has become quite controversial over the last few years.

During his presentation of the material, host Del Tackett interviews people representing different worldviews to compare them to what Christianity teaches. He also includes clarifying remarks from various Christian apologists and theologians to help instruct students in accurately representing the Christian faith.

One of those experts is Ravi Zacharias.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you probably know that Ravi’s reputation has imploded since his death in 2020. I’d like to reflect on that entire situation in a unique way because it is a lesson in critical thinking, humility, and in whom we are tempted to place our trust.

The Christian Celebrity

Ravi Zacharias led a double life. The ministry he founded, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), has publically admitted to all of it and shut down the ministry as a result.

On one hand, Ravi was a gifted communicator of the Gospel. A deep thinker. He defended the faith with clarity and a wealth of experience he drew from an eclectic cultural background. He was the complete package. A man who could handle the most aggressive skeptic with humility, grace, and truth. He was a model apologist. The kind of person every defender of Christianity longs to emulate.

At least on the outside.

Behind closed doors, it turns out that Ravi was a pervert. An abuser of women. His creepy sexual proclivities have been exposed for the world to see. Ravi’s post-mortem fall from grace is sad. But it is also proof that the prophet Jeremiah was right when he wrote (Jeremiah 17:9) that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”

The Psychopath

Though not as popular as Ravi Zacharias, David Wood is also a phenomenal communicator. He is best known as the go-to guy on the subject of Islam. But there is way more to David Wood than that. Wood has a PhD in Philosophy of Religion with a concentration on “the problem of evil.” He’s an expert on that subject, too -- mostly because he has lived his entire life as a psychopath.

That’s not my opinion. It’s a clinical diagnosis. You can listen to his testimony about it here. The thirty-four minutes you spend doing so will blow your mind.

David Wood feels no emotion when his pets die or, for that matter when his friends die. He admits to his struggles with being a husband and a father. In his words, he is a “screwed-up individual.”

Wood tried to bludgeon his father to death with a ball-peen hammer. He served time in prison as a result. That’s where he met Randy, a fellow prisoner and Christian who challenged him to answer questions and to think about the implications of his self-proclaimed atheism. Wood idolized reason and rationality. But Randy forced him to reason his way to the existence of objective morality — and to its Source. His story is a powerful example of why pursuing the truth should be our primary objective. It’s a reminder that Truth is found in Jesus of Nazareth ... and only in Him.

David Wood is one of the most unusual examples of that you could ever imagine — a literal psychopath who recognized that objective good needed an explanation and thereby reasoned his way to God.

Comparing David Wood to Ravi Zacharias illustrates an important point.

Reacting To Ravi

The case of Ravi Zacharias received a lot of press. Some of it came from Ravi’s sycophants, who denied the charges against him. People in that camp had to believe that multiple women around the world, all interviewed privately, had miraculously come up with identical descriptions of his methods and tastes. I would say that anyone who continued to believe that was delusional.

Then there were the critics of Christianity who were weaponizing Ravi’s story. That was just another iteration of the false argument that hypocritical Christians render Christianity unbelievable. That’s ridiculous. As David Wood put it: “If you tell me that 2 + 2 = 4 and then punch me in the mouth, that shouldn’t make me doubt that 2 + 2 = 4. And if you tell me that 2 + 2 = 5 and then buy me a new car, that shouldn’t make me start believing that 2 + 2 = 5.”

The truth Ravi articulated is still the truth, even if it came out of the mouth of a diabolical sexual predator.

It turns out that the more reasonable and predictable commentary about the case of Ravi came via a psychopath who gives wise advice about personal and professional accountability. No one who claims to be a minister of the Gospel should ever have demanded the unchecked liberty Ravi Zacharias did. And no ministry leadership team should ever have allowed him to receive it. Both Ravi and RZIM are responsible for the consequences. The heart to which Jeremiah 17:9 refers lives in all of us. Even those who are Christian “celebrities.”

Contrasting Characters

Pride is a powerful drug. It allowed Ravi Zacharias to rationalize his perversions. And he used the reach of his global ministry as justification for covering them up. After all, millions of people would be “disappointed” if the women he abused told the world what he was doing. Thus, the Christian celebrity spiraled deeper and deeper into a sewer of his own creation and never admitted he was drowning. No apologies. No remorse.

Meanwhile, the unemotional rationality of a psychopath led him to recognize his vulnerability to the pitfalls of pride. In this case, at least, he is the one to trust. But in his wisdom, he knows better than to encourage us to trust him. Instead, his message is a word of warning:

Don’t place your trust in any man.

The Unchanging Truth

Celebrity status has never been a measure of moral virtue. Ravi Zacharias was certainly not the first Christian celebrity to prove that point. And he won’t be the last.

Neither does being a sinner negate anyone’s capacity to know and live the truth ... even if they’re a psychopath.

The lesson for all of us here is that the truth, goodness, and beauty of Christianity don’t reside in any human being. They rest only on the objective reality that is their Source — the character of God himself.

Men will disappoint you. But the Truth doesn’t change.

It never will.

February 12th is Charles Darwin’s birthday. There aren’t many individuals who have had as much influence on the world as this one man. He is the godfather of the Theory of Evolution and the Materialistic worldview that embraces it. For that reason, he is the target of a lot of ire from religious believers. I disagree with almost everything Darwin represents. But I am also a proponent of attacking ideas, not persons.

We shouldn’t blame Darwin for what contemporary science has done with his Theory. I am no scientist, but I greatly appreciate the scientific enterprise and the experts who practice it. There is no denying that Charles Darwin was a brilliant man and an accomplished scientist. And I believe he was sincerely seeking to find the truth through his scientific investigations. But when you consider his background, it’s hard to argue that his life experiences didn’t taint his ability to examine things objectively. Charity demands that we should cut the guy some slack. If you know anything about the origin of Darwinism, I hope you’re compelled to agree.

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Before Darwinism

Charles Darwin was brought up in a non-conformist, Unitarian, “freethinking” family. That alone implies that he developed an unorthodox view of God in general and of Christianity in particular. But he also lived at a time when the modern Enlightenment mindset was exploding in popularity. Science and technology were changing the world rapidly. And God was turning into a passé answer to any question.

Crazy as it sounds, Darwin began his pursuit of higher education at Cambridge University, where he studied to become an Anglican clergyman. And he doesn’t seem to have doubted the literal truth of the Bible as an authoritative source for morality while he was there. At that point, Darwin wasn’t an atheist. In fact, he claimed that “an agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.” He thought of religion as a “community survival strategy.” But he still believed that God was the ultimate moral lawgiver. Though he was suspicious of the Bible’s historical reliability, it doesn’t seem appropriate to label him as an anti-theistic monster.

So, I don’t.

The Perennial Problem of Evil

All that said, I do believe Darwin suffered from a serious case of The-God-I-Believe-In-Wouldn’t-Do-It-That-Way mentality. That is, and always has been, the most common objection to God’s existence. Like many before and after him, Charles Darwin simply could not stomach the Problem of Evil. He couldn’t accept the idea that an omnipotent, omnibenevolent Deity would allow all the pain and suffering he saw in the world. For instance, Darwin couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that God would create a wasp that stung a caterpillar to paralyze it, and then use it as an incubator and food source for the wasp’s own eggs. What kind of demented deity would design a world like that?

The Problem Gets Personal

Charles Darwin had real trouble reconciling his view of science with his view of morality. And then, he experienced one of the most horrific tragedies any parent could face. His ten-year-old little girl, Annie, died. The pain of that experience followed Darwin for the rest of his life. And it’s palpable. You can feel it in a passage of Wordsworth’s poetry that was found marked in one of Darwin’s favorite books after he died ...

Surprised by joy – impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport – Oh! With whom But thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find? Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind – But how could I forget thee? Through what power, Even for the least division of an hour, Have I been so beguiled as to be blind To my most grievous loss? – That thought’s return Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore, Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more; That neither present time, nor years unborn Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

Annie died in 1851. And from that point forward, Charles Darwin labored to disassociate God from the title, “Grand Designer.” In his mind, no loving God would design a world that could be so cruel. His goal was to replace God with some natural explanation for the design of life. He wrote On The Origin Of Species in 1859.

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Reaction To Pain

How would any of us respond to the pain of losing our own child? It’s the kind of thing that makes emotion smother reason. Charles Darwin was a very smart man. But the pain and suffering that accompanies life was too much for him. I’m not saying it completely explains his thinking. But it would be hard to deny its impact. That’s why I think we should be charitable to the man. Instead of demonizing him, we should extend him grace.

There is no doubt that later atheists and God-haters have used what has come to be known as “Darwinism” to do away with God. But that doesn’t make Charles Darwin a God-hater. Maybe Darwin’s genuine revulsion toward the reality of evil led him to explain it away — to relieve God of the moral responsibility he would incur for allowing it. Maybe Darwin respected God too much to lay the blame for pain and suffering on Him.

Religious skeptics are quick to claim that God is just a psychological crutch for weak-minded people. So, if psychology can explain why some people believe in God, maybe it can also explain why some people don’t believe in God. Either way, how about we stop focusing on persons — no matter what their claims — and start focusing on the evidence? That’s where Darwinism falls short, and that’s the only thing that matters.

Darwin’s Ignorance

When it comes to evidence, Charles Darwin was operating at a severe disadvantage from us. He thought the cell was a glob of gelatin. No one had discovered the intricate details of the cellular machinery or knew that it operated as a highly designed factory.

Darwin didn’t know about DNA and the massive amount of information it holds. He had no clue that DNA is a digital information system — the kind of thing that doesn’t originate from an unguided process. He postulated that life could have begun spontaneously in some “warm little pond.” It would be nearly 150 years before origin-of-life scientists would discover the utter intractability of the questions and problems surrounding the issue of how life began.

Charles Darwin knew none of that. He told a story. A very compelling story. But the evidence we have today completely undermines that story. Organisms adapt to their surroundings. Nobody doubts that. But that does nothing to explain where life came from or the nature of the process that perpetuates it. And it doesn’t even pretend to explain human consciousness.

Doubting Darwinism

So let’s play fair. Maybe Darwin manufactured his theory because of a psychological inability to deal with the pain he saw in the world. But that doesn’t make it false; the evidence does.

We all have to admit that God allowing evil is a tough pill to swallow. But that’s a different question. Let’s just evaluate Darwinism on scientific grounds. That’s where we differ. The evidence just doesn’t support the case that’s been made in Darwin’s name.

We are to be respecters of men, but not of ideas — especially ideas that are both harmful and untrue. I prefer to disagree with Darwinism and leave poor Charles Darwin alone.

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Every once in a while, I reject all manner of common sense and enter a social media discussion in defense of the pro-life view. I often regret doing so soon after typing my first comment. But something inside me demands that I at least finish the discussion before stepping away and vowing never to do something like that again. Weeks or months later, for reasons I find hard to explain, the cycle continues.

I realize this is most likely an effort in futility. But each time, Greg Koukl’s words echo in my mind, encouraging me with the far-off hope that I may at least be “putting a stone in someone’s shoe” — leaving them with something to think about — a small doubt that will someday blossom into a real change of heart.

One can hope.

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I share this confession for just one reason — and this is not hyperbolic. In all those discussions over all those years, every single abortion supporter I have ever encountered has used at least one of the following euphemisms to dismiss my claim that the unborn are valuable human beings just like the rest of us:

1. “The unborn is not alive! It’s a ‘potential’ life.” This one is even used by those in the Francis Collins camp — Christians who are “personally pro-life.” For some reason, these folks don’t want to impose their view — that killing innocent human beings is wrong — on anyone else. But it’s a scientific fact that life begins at the moment of conception. You can read about it in any embryology textbook. And that means it’s not a potential life. It’s an actual life.

2. “It’s not a person; it’s a fetus.” These folks apparently believe a fetus is a thing of its own. They don’t realize the definition of a fetus is “the unborn young of a viviparous vertebrate having a basic structural resemblance to the adult animal.” A fetus is not a thing; it’s a stage in the development of a thing. And, in the case of abortion, that “thing” is a developing human being.

3. “It’s just a ‘clump of cells!” Technically, they’re right of course. But somehow, they’ve lost the fact that they could also be considered a “clump of cells.” I mean, all of us are clumps of cells. But, just like the unborn human being, those cells are connected together in a complete, whole, integrated organism that is functioning exactly as it should at whatever stage of development it happens to be in.

I’m not kidding. Every interaction I’ve ever had with anyone online includes at least one of these euphemisms from the abortion defender. It’s a hallmark of their position. And the media repeats it every chance they get.

But this week, I saw a new twist on this trend when the New York Times weighed in once again in the battle over unborn human beings. And I point this out without any commentary on the political nature of the discussion. That’s not the issue.

What I want you to see is the magic trick the Times pulled off when it transformed the worthless fetus/potential human life/clump of cells into an actual, valuable human being.

But only when it suited the Times’ purpose, of course.

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It’s Only a Fetus!

To demonstrate the trick, let me use just one example — a quote from an August 2022 story they published titled, “Is a Fetus a Person? An Anti-Abortion Strategy Says Yes.”

Fetal personhood, which confers legal rights from conception, is an effort to push beyond abortion bans and classify the procedure as murder. In Georgia, it also means a $3,000 tax credit.

The Times’ goal here was clear. They wanted to expose the nefarious tactics of pro-lifers who try to guilt opponents of abortion into thinking the lowly fetus is in some way a “person.” Using this tactic, pro-lifers wrongly impede the right to abortion by classifying women’s reproductive health choices as “murder.”

Who would resort to such lowly tactics?

Well, it turns out the New York Times would. Therein lies the magic trick.

They’re Valuable Children!

Just a few days ago, while engrossed in the arguments about renewed efforts by the Trump administration to deport “undocumented workers,” the Times published another story, this one in defense of “birthright citizenship.” This story, titled, “Undocumented Women Ask: Will My Unborn Child Be a Citizen?” finds it appalling that the federal government would deny citizenship rights to unborn children who, the Times believes, deserve that citizenship in light of being babies who are already on American soil even if they’re still inside their mother’s wombs.

Do you see the trick?

Journalistic Magic

When the New York Times wants to protect abortion “rights,” it dehumanizes unborn children.

But when the New York Times wants to support birthright citizenship, it magically turns those same “clumps of cells” into citizens with rights.

Again, I am not wading into the politics of either position. My point is simply to illustrate that the New York Times’ hypocrisy is as massive as its moral reasoning is microscopic. And there are plenty of people who will join right in with them.

It’s the reason Frank Turek has famously said that he reads both the Bible and the New York Times every day … so he knows what both sides are up to.

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