Today’s New Reason To Believe

Kenneth Richard Samples

In the first two installments of this series I pointed out that while disunity among Christians is a problem that hurts the overall Christian witness, many people (especially skeptics) fail to appreciate the tremendous unity that historic believers share in common. The Christian faith encapsulates a set of beliefs, a collection of values, and encompasses a broad world-and-life view. In these three critical areas that define the essence of historic Christianity, the faith holds a vigorous unity.

I also conveyed that though denominationalism presents clear challenges to unity, it also emits positive features that contribute to the health of the various Christian theological traditions. (See here and here.)

In this article I will address the role that sin and hypocrisy play in creating disunity, specifically in terms of how the church is viewed by nonbelievers.

Sometimes the lack of unity in the body of Christ links to sinful behavior among believers. As with all families, Christians simply struggle at times to “get along” with each other. However, people outside the church view these family conflicts negatively. But this strong reaction may be based upon a deep misunderstanding about the nature of Christianity itself.

Nonbelievers are put off by the sins and perceived hypocritical behavior of Christians. Those outside the church sometimes view believers who toil to meet the moral ideals set forth in Scripture as phonies and hypocrites. Yet while hypocrisy is always regrettable and never to be condoned within a Christian context, I think the nonbelievers’ offense at hypocrisy is frequently rooted in a flawed perception of the nature of sin.

More than Merely Bad Deeds or Bad Habits

Non-Christians often view sin as merely a bad deed or habit. Consequently, the Christian faith is perceived as, essentially, a set of moral rules to follow in order to be acceptable to God. So when the non-believer sees a believer failing to live up to the moral rules, he concludes that the believer is inauthentic. However, this seriously underestimates the severity of the nature of sin.

A Debilitating Moral and Spiritual Condition

According to the Bible, the problem of sin runs much deeper than bad actions or bad patterns of behavior. Scripture describes sin as a debilitating force that permeates the very core of every human being (Psalm 51:5, 58:3; Proverbs 20:9). In fact, humans are not sinners simply because they happen to sin. Rather the problem is much more fundamental. Human beings sin because they are sinners by nature.

Historic Christianity teaches that human beings suffer from original sin, having inherited a sin nature from their progenitor, Adam (Romans 5:12, 18-19). This inherited sin nature resides at the heart (inner being) of mankind (Jeremiah 17:9; Matthew 15:19), and thus affects the entire person—mind, will, affections, and body (Ephesians 2:3, 4:17-19). The result is that all people personally sin and are therefore morally accountable to God (Romans 3:23).

Forgiven Sinners, But Not Yet Perfect

Upon regeneration (spiritual rebirth, John 3:3), the Holy Spirit implants a new, righteous nature in the justified-by-faith sinner. However, a person’s original nature remains even after conversion; that’s why Christians still sin (1 John 1:8-10). Conversion is the beginning, not the end, of a long process of transformation called sanctification (being set apart to do God’s will).

Biblically speaking, moral and ethical perfection is not instantaneous, nor even attainable, in this life (1 Kings 8:46; 1 John 1:8). So a certain level of immaturity and imperfection, including some hypocrisy (though always regrettable), can be expected of believers (James 3:2).

Christians spend a lifetime striving to gain freedom not from sin’s penalty (which Christ accomplished through his death and resurrection) but from its power over them. The ultimate transformation, which is glorification into the expressed image of Christ, awaits the Christian only in the eternal age to come.

The upshot is that historic Christianity teaches that human beings, because of their rebellion against God, are broken people. Through redemption this brokenness is being mended slowly. Nevertheless, the collective community of believers (the church) sometimes shows evidence of the deep scars of sin.

Upon honest inspection the unbeliever will discover the common ground of human moral corruption. Hypocrisy is evidence of man’s total depravity. The nonbeliever faces God’s future judgment without a Savior (Hebrews 9:27-28). But the life of the believer and the church as a whole is marked by a constant need to confess one’s sins and rely upon the grace of God in Christ to help overcome the power of sin.

For more on the problem of human sin and its resolution in and through the person of Jesus Christ, see my two books Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions and A World of Difference: Putting Christian Truth-Claims to the Worldview Test.

by Hugh Ross

At two different outreach events this past month I met both atheists and young-earth creationists who expressed skepticism concerning the evidence I presented for the biblically predicted big bang creation model.¹ While admitting that the evidence I presented was compelling, they claimed the fact that astronomers cannot agree on exactly what kind of big bang describes the origin and history of the universe proves that the big bang creation model resides on a shaky foundation.

This critique could be brought against any explanation of any phenomenon within the record of nature. One would need to possess complete knowledge and understanding about every complexity of a phenomenon before one could settle upon a unique and exhaustively complete explanation of every detail of the phenomenon. Since only God is omniscient, such an explanation will forever remain beyond the bounds of human knowledge. Another way to put it is that only God possesses absolute proof.

Limitations on human knowledge, however, do not imply that astronomers can never achieve any degree of certainty on any aspect of the state of the universe. In a court of law an explanation for an event is considered proven if no other reasonable explanation for that event exists within the realm of possibility. Scientists employ the same principle in their scientific research. In addition, they possess another powerful testing tool.

Scientists consider a scientific theory or model to have attained a level of practical proof when, over a lengthy period of time, rigorous and thorough testing demonstrates that the model produces an increasingly more specific, more detailed, more comprehensive, more predictive, and/or more accurate explanation for the phenomenon. An issue for critics of the big bang creation model then becomes, have any of these practical proofs been established or has the reverse been observed?

Two researchers from Krakow, Poland, one an astronomer, the other a mathematician, recently developed a new practical proof, based on Bayesian statistics, for the big bang creation model. In their paper the Polish researchers, Aleksandra Kurek and Marek Szydlowski, consider ten different big bang creation models in the light of the latest measurements of the cosmic background radiation, type Ia supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillation, and the Hubble constant.² Their goal was to determine whether the newest measurements offered a superior confirmation of the model in question by showing that a more, specified identification of the big bang creation event was possible. They sought to answer whether Bayesian statistical analysis could show that one, rather than many, of the ten possible big bang creation models was significantly more favored.

All of the new measurements decisively narrow down the class of viable big bang creation models. First they favor those in which the current universe is in an accelerating mode of expansion. Second, they all establish that most of the matter in the universe is comprised of exotic dark matter (matter made up of particles that interact very weakly, or not at all, with light). Third, they are also all consistent with a flat geometry universe and none permit anything but a small departure from flatness. These three conclusions by themselves establish a much more specific set of big bang creation models than what was possible a decade ago. Thus, astronomers are fully justified in their assessment that the scientific evidence for a big bang creation event has become much stronger rather than weaker.

Kurek and Szydlowski noted that the remaining family of big bang creation models fall into two philosophical categories: one where the accelerated cosmic expansion is explained by some kind of “dark energy” and the other where it is explained by some inhomogeneity in the universe’s distribution of matter, energy, or space. They classified five different sets of cosmic models that could be fit into the first category and five more that could be fit into the second. Their Bayesian statistical analysis first demonstrated that the new measurements favored the first category over the second. Within that first category the cold dark matter big model with a cosmological constant was the statistically favored model. In this particular model the exotic matter particles are predominantly moving at low velocities as opposed to velocities nearing the speed of light and the dark energy can be defined by a physical non-varying constant.

Thus, even stronger evidence now exists that the more astronomers learn about the universe, the more specific a big bang creation model they can identify as remaining consistent with their observations of the universe. New observations consistently provide increasingly stronger proofs for a big bang creation event and big bang Creator.

1. Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos 3rd ed. (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2001): 23-29.
2. Aleksandra Kurek and Marek Szydlowski, “The ?CDM Model in the Lead—A Bayesian Cosmological Model Comparison,” Astrophysical Journal 675 (March 1, 2008):1-7.

David H. Rogstad, Ph.D.
[Originally posted on February 1, 2008]

Early in my career as a scientist, the most difficult activity, next to writing peer-reviewed papers, was standing up in front of an audience of peers to talk about my research. I was terrified of being asked a question I couldn’t answer or of someone spotting a weak link in my reasoning. While I still struggle with the writing part, speaking to a group has become less frightening thanks to some advice I received from a friend.

“As one trying to follow the Master,” he said, “our focus should be less on making ourselves look good and more on making others successful.” For one whose primary concern was the furtherance of my own career this posed quite a switch, but it made sense in light of what Jesus said to his disciples about how to become great (Matthew 20:25-26).

My first opportunity to test this idea arrived when I started a new position working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where I was paid to do a job instead of pursue my own research interests. My superiors gave me the task of developing real-time, interrupt-driven control software for a Very Long Baseline Interferometry correlation system. I barely had a clue about what to do. Day after day, I prayed for God’s wisdom and help. After struggling with it for a good part of a year, my boss wanted me to give a review and status report to some higher-level managers. Needless to say, the prospect terrified me.

In this circumstance I remembered my friend’s advice and thought it might be applicable. Instead of worrying about how I would appear, I chose to focus on giving a presentation that would make my boss look good. I was surprised at how effective this viewpoint proved, both in relieving me of fear and resulting in a presentation that was well-received. From that time on I decided to work on making others successful and to trust God for my own success. In time, I discovered that this principle related to Jesus’ claim that there is more joy in giving than in receiving (Acts 20:35).

When I became a technical group supervisor a few years later, I had plenty of opportunities to practice this principle. My goal became to figure out what I could do to make each member of my team productive in their jobs. What resources did they need? What special training was required? Did they need help getting past a difficult problem? Did they need to switch tasks? How could I encourage them? If they were successful, then I was successful. In fact, I received a lot of the credit when my team did a good job. If I focused on myself, I became jealous, competitive, anxious, and prideful. When I worked on making them a success, I experienced the joy that God promised to those who give. As a side benefit, the team members were much more willing to help each other and to receive help and correction from me.

Putting this biblical principle into practice provided me with one more example of how God’s commands are meant to bring us abundant life, not to interfere with our freedom.