In college, my wife stayed with another family while she was in grad school. They were very giving to her, very welcoming, very warm. On occasion, they would try to pull her into conversations and playful disagreements. She liked both of them, and she refused to take sides. She said, "I'm Switzerland. I'm neutral." Of course, Switzerland as a country has historically been neutral. They don't take sides in things.

It's often today that we view neutrality as a good thing. “He doesn't take sides. He's not narrow-minded. He's neutral,” People may say. I think this sometimes flows over into how we think about theology and people and ideas and approaches, but in reality, there's no neutral approach from a religious perspective.

You can't evaluate Christianity from a neutral position because you're either going to reason from the idea and a conviction that God exists and the supernatural is possible, or you will reason from the idea that it's not possible. There's not a neutral ground. Either God exists and the supernatural is possible, or he doesn't and it's not. There's no middle ground there.

The presuppositions, the pre-commitments we bring to the evidence when we evaluate it has a lot to do with how compelling we're going to find the evidence. I think this goes without saying in some areas, but when we get to Christianity, we seem to often think that people can be neutral, that they can make value-free judgements, but no judgment is value-free. We all interpret evidence and make statements from inside of a world view. Because of these presuppositions, these pre-commitments, an Atheist and a Christian will interpret the same evidence differently. The same information gets seen differently because we have different lenses.

It's like if one friend has non-polarized sunglasses and another friend has polarized sunglasses. They're out on a boat. They're going to be seeing different things. Not totally different, but different in the details. The friend with the polarized glasses might be able to see the fish under the water, but the other friend might not be able to see it. The friend without the polarized glasses is much more likely to see glare and maybe not natural colors. The guy with the polarized glasses is going to see a more detailed and a more accurate picture. I hope this “lens” approach helps you understand that the lenses we use in terms of our worldviews are the pre-commitments we bring to the evidence and will greatly affect how we view it, but there is no neutral ground with regards to evaluating evidence because our pre-commitments influence how we see everything. More than that, man is not actually a morally neutral creature. Sometimes, people will talk like, "Well, man needs God, yes, but it's not like he's bad in his current state."

Well, the bible doesn't leave that as an option. In fact, Paul says that “the mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God. It does not submit to a God's law, nor can it do so.” This is in Romans eight. Here, he's making the point that the person in the flesh cannot please God. You're either in the flesh, which is not a Christian, or you're in the Spirit, which is someone who's been regenerated, who is a Christian. You'll notice there's no neutral ground there. You're either in the flesh, can't please God, or in the spirit, and you can please God. No neutral ground. One category or the other, but man isn't neutral even when he's not a Christian. He has a mind that is governed by the flesh. Paul says it's hostile to God. Not neutral with regards to God, hostile, because if you take a neutral position, something you might consider neutral with regard to God, God actually views that as hostility. He actually views it as rebellion. There is no middle ground with God.

Do you have to have a conversion experience in order to be a Christian?

A couple of weeks ago I did a podcast on the fact that there's a heart behind every question, that often what seems to some, and often to me, as just an intellectual question, really has something that's deeply heartfelt behind it. The person perhaps asking about works, and salvation, or eternal security, or you fill in the blank, often isn't just trying to satisfy some intellectual curiosity. They have something that's troubling them emotionally, and existentially. Well, one of the examples I gave was of someone asking, "Do I have to have a moment? Do I have to have kind of a Damascus road experience where I was uniquely and powerfully aware of coming to Christ?"

Well, since that episode I've had some more conversations where that topic have come up and people have asked me to provide more details about that. I figured it'd be helpful for us to cover that today.

Do you have to have a moment? Do you have to have a time where you became distinctly, or let's say, powerfully aware of becoming a Christian? I'm going to say, no. You don't have to have such a moment. I want to establish a few things as we work towards an answer here. The first thing to point out is you're either a Christian or you're not. There's not a middle ground. For instance, in 1 Corinthians 1:18 Paul says, "That the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved, it's the power of God." One message, two groups. There's no middle ground. You're either perishing or you are being saved.

In Paul's vernacular, that would be someone who's a Christian and who's ultimately being perfected unto the time they die, and are glorified, and are with Christ. You're either a Christian or you're not.

Romans 8 says people who are in the flesh cannot please God, but if you're in the Spirit, you can please God. No middle ground. Once again, you're in the flesh or you're in the Spirit. You can't please God or you can. No middle category. The reason I'm bringing this up is to show that there's not kind of like a,” you're an almost Christian, you're a kind of Christian.” You either have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit or you haven't been. God has either taken out that heart of stone and put in a heart of flesh or he hasn't. You're either dead in your sins or you're alive in Christ. There is the reality of the fact that at some point for everyone who becomes a Christian or is a Christian, there will be a time when you were not a Christian and in the next instant you are a Christian.

When the Holy Spirit does that wonderfully transformative, glorious work on your heart and in fact, your nature, and in so many other things, that happens at a specific point in time. It's not a gradual process, it's a decisive act of the sovereignty of God. However, in spite of the fact that that is a decisive act at a point in time, our knowledge of that, our apprehension of that, may not actually line up with that event. I see nothing in scripture that leads me to believe that the Christian should expect an experience in coming to Christ.

Now, yes, in Acts at that transitionary point when the Holy Spirit has come, new people are included in the covenant. That transition and the apprehension of the Holy Spirit is marked by a sign, the speaking of tongues, and miracles, and other things at that point, but there's nothing in the text that leads us to believe this should be the norm for the Christian today.

Often also, the conversions that are described in scripture are for adults when there is a conscious shift that happens from someone who is opposed to Christ in their thinking, to someone who makes a conscious decision to submit their life to Christ, to rep…

Does Proverbs contain a blatant contradiction? It tells us to answer a fool according to his folly, and in the very next verse, not to answer a fool according to his folly. Stay tuned to find out on Unapologetic.

If you've had very many conversations about the Bible, you assuredly have heard someone say that it contains contradictions. Now, often when people say this, it's helpful to say, "Well can you show me one? Can you show me a contradiction?" Because it's really easy for someone to throw out a claim like that and have no idea if it's true or why it's true. You'll actually be surprised that, when people make that claim, they can't actually even show you one.

Now this is often true for people like Mormons and followers of the LDS faith. They'll say, "The Bible's been corrupted. You can't trust it." You can ask them, "Well what's a part that's been corrupted? What part don't you trust?" Often they can't actually point to anything. They don't have an idea. They've just heard that claim. This is true often with other non-Christians too, like atheists, who will say the Bible contains contradictions. Well where? Show me one. That should be our first reply. Our first response should not be to start defending the truthfulness of scripture. Make the other person prove their point. Show me a contradiction.

Now if they show you something that seems to be a contradiction, we can talk about that. Let's actually talk about one example today. In Proverbs 26, verses 4 and 5, we read this:

“Don't answer a fool according to his folly lest you be like him yourself.

Some people have said this appears to be a contradiction. One verse says to not answer a fool according to his folly and the next says to answer him according to his folly. Which is it? This seems like a blatant contradiction.

The first thing to point out is the more blatant the contradiction seems, the less likely it's a contradiction. Here's what I mean by that. If you were to read a newspaper article that seemed to contain an incredibly blatant contradiction, would you think the author was just too dumb to realize that? Or would you think maybe there's something else going on? Maybe I've misunderstood or maybe he's getting at something else.

When something is back to back like these two verses, they're verses 4 and 5, and they seem to say entirely opposite things, do we really think the writer was that dumb? That people didn't realize that? Are we really that advanced today? Well no, we're not. People weren't automatically just dumb back in the ancient world either. I think the first thing we can say here is obviously the author didn't think these were contradictory. They might seem contradictory on the face of it to us, but the fact that they're included back to back I think strongly points out the fact that whoever wrote this did not think it was contradictory.

Now we also need to deal with the fact that these are proverbs, so we need to interpret literature according to its genre. Not everything in the Bible is a set of scientific, propositional statements like, "This thing weighs this much exactly and is this color and this long." No, this is a proverb, which is a generally true wise saying. Proverbs are not laws; they're not spiritual laws; they're not laws of nature. So, they're not always true. It's always truthful wisdom, but that doesn't mean that everything a proverb says is always true.

For instance, "Train up your child in the way he should go, and when he's old, he won't depart from it," is not a promise. It is possible to train up a child in the way he should go, and when he's old, he may depart from it. The thing is, it's ge…

Today's episode is largely for me. Now, of course, you can listen; I hope you do. I'm speaking to myself here more than I usually do. Usually, I'm speaking from something that I'm confident in, that I've researched, that I speak on, that I write on, those types of things, but today I'm speaking from more an area of weakness and something that I need to remind myself of: remembering that there is usually a heart behind the question.

Now, of course, everyone who asks a question has a heart, has a soul, that type of thing. What I mean, is that a lot of times the person asking the question isn't just wanting to bat around an intellectual idea. They're not looking for a stimulating academic conversation. A lot of times, there's something emotionally attached to the question they ask, and I often forget that, honestly. I don’t take that into account. That’s not my first response much of the time.

I think this is a liability that we need to be aware of as we seek to be more informed and as we seek to address issues and topics and culture that we often talk about on this podcast, because there are liabilities that comes when you have well thought-out views and you know exactly where you, stand and you're confident: that can come across as cold and heartless. It comes across as academic.

Now I think some of this is due to our unique cultural moment that we're in, where if someone speaks definitively about something, that they don’t pause and they don’t say "um" a lot, that it sometimes comes across as closed-minded or sterile at the least. When we get a question on salvation and, “Is Jesus the only way of salvation?” We might quickly reply “Yes, most assuredly. John 14:6 says, ‘Jesus is the way to truth and light. No one comes to the Father but through him.’ Paul makes it clear that there's no other name under heaven where men can be saved, these types of things.”

We can just launch into that and give a very thorough explanation, but the person may be thinking that their grandparents never actually had opportunity to hear the gospel. Maybe they have a relative or maybe they just can't bring themselves to believe that God exists or Jesus exists. They realize that on this view you're putting forth, that this means they will suffer in hell for eternity. There's something very real in terms of the consequences of the idea that’s involved in your answer. Yet, all too often (I’ll just speak for myself), I hop in and give the answer to the question, and I don’t even think of the heart behind it. Now I've gotten better at this over the years, but I still find myself surprised at how often I miss this point.

For instance, recently I was having a conversation and a question was asked, and I just thought it was kind of an intellectual curiosity: "Do you think people need to have a moment, kind of a Paul Damascus Road type of moment where they become distinctly aware of the fact that they're a Christian? Do you need to be able to cite when you became a Christian to the day?” I said, "No. You know, it's interesting. I've been doing some reading and there are people who think you should just have a child that grows up and they never know anything different than being a Christian." The person said, "Well, is this a good thing?" I said, "Yeah."

I go to move on, talk about something else (we're in a group of people), and I look back and this person is very emotional at this point. They look upset, and I’m thinking, "Oh, gosh, what did I say? What did I say this time?" It turns out that this person had been told throughout their life that they needed to have a “moment.” If you didn’t have a moment, then you probably weren't a Christian and that type of thing.

There's no Biblical foundation for that at all, and I think often this vie…

There's too much information for evolution to be true.

Now you might be thinking, "Aren't there tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of studies that show that evolution is true?" Well that all depends on several things. The first might be what you mean by evolution.

Anytime we talk about this topic we need to define our terms here. I was just having a conversation this last Sunday after small group with a PhD student that's in my small group. We were talking about evolution and we actually disagree on some things, but some of that is just related to the fact that we use the term in different ways at points. Many people do today. In fact this guy and I, we have pretty much the same perspective on the issue, the same biblical worldview, and yet we use the term differently at points. It's the same way with Christians and non-Christians.

We need to define our terms because evolution, at least one usage of the term, just simply means change over time. Then we could take that a little further, and sometimes people will use it to refer to small successive changes over time, and we might call that micro-evolution. Then others will use it, and what they're referring to is a mechanism that's able to generate a change in kinds over time. We would call that macro-evolution. That's pretty much the most common usage of the term today: this idea that life came about from a single celled organism, that over time reproduced more, and more, and more, and became sufficiently more and more complicated through the twin mechanism of natural selection and mutation.

As the genetic code is copied more and more as organisms reproduce, mutations occur—changes in that genetic code that are unintentional; they are a natural byproduct of this reproductive process. The changes that help the organism survive get “selected for,” and those organisms survive more, so they're more likely to pass on those helpful genetic changes. That's natural selection. This pair of processes has also been called the neo-Darwinian Synthesis—the ideas of Darwin that have kind of been improved on, and changed, over time.

That's the most common usage, but there are some usages even in between these, where some people might believe that evolution fits with an idea that God created life. Not that he used evolution to do it even, but that he used evolution to provide for the diversity of life within kinds after he created. That's not the view that's most common in secular institutions today, but that is a view of evolution. It is a valid usage of that term, but all of this goes to show that we need to define our terms.

Now when I talk about evolution, by and large, and in the rest of this episode, I'm going to be referring to that totally naturalistic, unguided process that you're most likely to hear about in a university biology department, the neo-Darwinian Synthesis. That life started as single cell organism and over time through random mutation and natural selection, became as complicated as it is today, with human beings, and the great diversity we see.

Now I started out this episode by saying there's too much information for evolution to be true. Here's what I mean by that. I don't mean that there are studies or aren't studies, what I mean is: our DNA, our genetic code is actually information. Information is the product of a mind. Information is what's conveyed by a certain structure or sequence of data, or things. That's actually what genetic code is.

Genetic code is information. It's a structured sequence that actually codes for the things it produces. Here's the kicker, information is the product of a mind. For instance, if you were just walking through the woods, and you saw a bunch of pine cones on each other, and they're not structured, and a…