The Christian Post is publishing an eight-part series about Christians who are “Leaving Christianity.” The series “explores the reasons why many Americans are rejecting the faith they grew up with.” I have to say that some of the reasons these former professing Christians used to justify their rejection of “the faith once delivered” are pitiful. One has to wonder what kind of Christian faith did they believe, and in the case of Ryan J. Bell who was a pastor for 20 years, preach.
I responded to the Ryan J. Bell article in a previous post: “Christians Who Become Atheists Find it Impossible to Live as Consistent Atheists.”
It seems that many of these post-Christian atheists seem to gravitate to the LGBT side of the moral spectrum. It happened with Josh Harris and Ryan Bell. Science and a high school course in biology and some recent statistics from the CDC will show that homosexuality is a moral and scientific dead end.
Consider the following from the CDC:
Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) have been rising among gay and bisexual men, with increases in syphilis being seen across the country. In 2014, gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men accounted for 83% of primary and secondary syphilis cases where sex of sex partner was known in the United States. Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men often get other STDs, including chlamydia and gonorrhea infections. HPV (Human papillomavirus), the most common STD in the United States, is also a concern for gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men. Some types of HPV can cause genital and anal warts and some can lead to the development of anal and oral cancers. Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men are 17 times more likely to get anal cancer than heterosexual men. Men who are HIV-positive are even more likely than those who do not have HIV to get anal cancer.
The first article in the series is by Luke Douglas. It’s titled “I lost my faith in a Chick-fil-A,” although the article doesn’t say anything about Chick-fil-A. The author’s a bright guy. He memorized a lot of the Bible, much more than I ever memorized. He holds a Juris Doctorate with a concentration in constitutional law and a Bachelor of Arts in communications.
What was the tripwire? He watched the debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye. Here’s how he explained what happened:
On that track, I learned there’s a funny thing about legal education. It requires you to argue for both sides of a case. The better you understand your opponent’s position, the better you will be at advancing your own. So in the interest of being the best Christian apologist I could be, I learned a fair bit about arguments for and against Christianity and took a strong interest in the work of the apologist who influenced me most growing up, Ken Ham.
When he debated Bill Nye the Science Guy on the scientific legitimacy of creationism, I was about halfway through law school and organized a debate watch party, ordered pizza, and gathered my evangelical colleagues to root for Ham together. So imagine how devastating it was to watch my childhood icon be so embarrassingly destroyed before my very eyes. Ken Ham brought faith to an evidence fight, and even my fundamentalist creationist eyes could see it. I resolved in that moment to learn more about evolution, astronomy, and geology so that, when it was my turn to debate the Bill Nyes of the world, I would do better than Ken Ham had.
This tells me that Luke Douglas doesn’t know much about apologetics and in the case of creation v. evolution, he doesn’t know how “to argue for both sides of a case.”
The following was my assessment of how Ken Ham should have argued in his debate with Bill Nye.
On February 4, 2014, Ken Ham, Creation Museum Founder and Answers in Genesis President/CEO debated Bill Nye at the Creation Museum on this question: “Is creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern scientific world?”
Bill Nye is the former host of the popular Bill Nye the Science Guy TV program for children. He is a frequent pro-evolution guest on TV interview programs and a climate change alarmist.
How would I have gone about debating Bill Nye the Science Guy? First, I never would have agreed to the question being debated. I would have chosen “Is Abiogenesis a Viable Model of Origins in any World?” Abiogenesis means that life arose from non-living matter. This is what it’s all about: something from nothing and life from non-life. The debate would be over before it started. To win, Bill Nye will have to demonstrate scientifically (demonstrate is the keyword) that life as we know it came from non-life from no outside intelligent agency.
In reality, evolution is about alchemy without already having the lead to turn into gold, conjuring something out of nothing. Not even Penn & Teller claim to be able to do that. There’s always something when it seems that they are conjuring things out of thin air. Every “magician” will admit this.
Until evolutionists demonstrate (1) the origin of matter out of nothing (a topic they rarely want to talk about and can’t demonstrate empirically), (2) how inorganic matter evolved into organic matter (spontaneous generation), (3) the origin of information and its meaningful organization (DNA programming), and (4) a genetic explanation for why it is mandatory that anyone be moral (ethics), evolution is a modern form of alchemy. In a word, it’s anti-scientific.
No evolutionist has ever shown a single example of spontaneous generation. That’s why evolutionists want to talk about this found skull and that found femur and this percentage of chimpanzee DNA in relation to human DNA. It’s a long way from nothing to you and me and everything in between. I want to know how nothing became something and how that something became Bill Nye and the rest of the life we see on planet Earth in terms of what can be demonstrated scientifically since that’s the operating assumption of Nye and Douglas.
Make the UnScience Guy account for the stuff of the cosmos, the organized information to make the cosmos act the way it does, how non-life became life as we know it given the fact that spontaneous generation is rejected by the scientific community on scientific grounds.
Also make Nye account for non-physical entities like reason, logic, and morality and why the things that we evolved entities do or don’t do have eternal consequences, and if they don’t, then what would be morally (not socially, legally, culturally, or pragmatically) wrong for someone to put a loaded gun to Bill Nye’s head and pull the trigger. Watch this short film titled “Cruel Logic” by Brian Godawa.
How would Luke Douglas answer the questions put to him?
As a popularizer of science, Bill Nigh must prove all these things empirically. I would not allow him to use philosophical or theoretical arguments since they are not science because they have not been demonstrated in the lab.
Bill Nye goes by “The Science Guy” not “The Theoretical Science Guy” or even “The Philosophy Guy.”
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Available at American Vision’s online store.[/caption]
Ken Ham needed to stick to the operating assumptions of Bill Nye and never let go. It’s called “forcing the antithesis,” pushing him to live in terms of his operating presuppositions.
At one point in the debate, Bill Nye said that Ken Ham’s view was “troubling” to him. This was Ham’s opening. Ham should have come back with example after example of how a godless, matter-only cosmic origin strips meaning and morality from what makes us human.
After reading some of the scary things atheist evolutionists say about morality, Ham should have looked into the camera and spoken directly to parents and said the following:
What I just read to you from some of the most well-known atheists are the raw edge of evolutionary thought. In the end, this is what evolution teaches. Over the long term, what do you think will happen to a population of young people who are told that this is what they really are? Not only don’t Bill Nye and his fellow evolutionists have the necessary empirical science to prove that life spontaneously appeared and evolved into the intricately designed beings that we are, but they don’t have any way to account for meaning, morality, reason, love, hope, and justice.
Evolutionists like Bill Nye can’t live consistently with their matter-only worldview. The worldview that troubles him is the only worldview that gives his life meaning. We’re more than a conglomeration of molecules. He, like your children, was made in the image of God. You have a choice. You can believe in an approach to origins that claims that we are nothing but a “purposeless and materialistic process,” “an animal,” or you can believe that you and your children are special creations of a loving and just God.
I hope Luke Douglas’ legal arguments are better than the reasons he’s put forth in his article about becoming an atheist.