“Apologetics in the Void” are repostings from an on-going electronic discussion and debate I had some time ago with members of our local community. The list serve is called Vision 20/20, and hence the name “visionaries.” Reading just these posts probably feels like listening to one half of a phone conversation, but I don’t feel at liberty to publish what others have written. But I have been editing these posts (lightly) with intelligibility in mind.
Dear visionaries,
And in response to William’s question, the “meat grinder” of natural selection cannot work without nature being “red in tooth and claw.” Death, disease, suffering, pain — in short, the problem of evil — cannot be God’s method, unless we are prepared to say that something like cancer is a positive good like food, air, and sunshine. Given what the Scriptures reveal about the goodness of God, I am not prepared to do that.
It is not illegitimate “polarizing” to point out what a position entails. If evolution were God’s good method of creating all living things, a more wasteful process for an omnipotent being can hardly be imagined. But if evolution is occurring in an atheistic universe, then we do not have this problem with evil, because there is no such thing as evil. But then we have the enormous problem of explaining the mechanics of how matter can organize itself into higher and higher degrees of engineered complexity. All that engineering, and no engineer. Just like magic.
Anyway, to keep us on the point of the larger discussion, multitudes of Christian parents have decided it is far easier to start private schools or educate their children at home than to try to explain basic worldview concepts to those who run the government schools. People actually say things like, “There is no such thing as modernity.” So to tie this in with the “rumor” thread, we are not interested in taking over your institutions. You, however, seem bent on not understanding your own institutions, chasing your best people out of them, downgrading them, abandoning them, and not defending them. But intellectual apathy preserves nothing.