Free Republic

In this post I take Physicist Stephen Barr to task for his misquoting Saint Augustine's position on the dating of God's creation -- e.g., old or young earth" The problem with Dr. Barr’s summation is that he has failed to take into account that people’s views on matters change over time. For instance, R.C. Sproul (evangelical scholar, professor, and President of Ligonier Ministries) mentioned that through most of his teaching career he accepted the old-age position. However, late in his career he changed his position to that of the young earth creationists. For most of my teaching career, I considered...

G. K. Chesterton once told a story about "an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was an island in the South Seas." The yachtsman "landed (armed to the teeth and speaking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the pavilion at Brighton." Expecting to have discovered New South Wales, he realized "that it was really old South Wales." Chesterton was talking about the way in which we cast off the truths we learned as children, only later, if we are fortunate, to...

Since the nineteenth century, we have been told a story about nature, man, and science. The story, the product of a materialistic worldview, tells us how science put man in his proper place: not at the center of creation, but at the periphery, a cosmic accident. Science, the story goes, not only "dethroned" man, it rendered God, and belief in God, superfluous. And of course, "there is no evidence of a spiritual realm, or that God or souls are real." There is only "matter: atoms in ceaseless, aimless motion," and since atoms have "no purposes or goals," there is no...