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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Taking the Bible seriously,
By
This review is from: Why Believe? God Exists!: Rethinking the Case for God and Christianity (Paperback)
Some people may say that Gary Harbemas's book is just about quoting scripture. That is not true, for that matter. But I want to leave a word of caution to those who dismiss the Bible too fast. Can they understand modern republican, democratic and human rights standards without reference to the New Testament? Can they understand world history and contemporary reality without quiting the Bible? The truth is that the world is not coming from where men like Darwin, Dennett, Dawkins or Gould say it is coming from, nor is it going where men like Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin or Hitler (or Fukuyama, or Huntington) have thought is is going. Jesus Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Darwinism has failed to give a convincing account, by any "preponderance of evidence standard" (much less by any "beyond reasonable doubt standard"), of the origins of energy, matter, space and time. It has failed to give a convincing account of the origins of life, the information in DNA, macroevolution, complex specified information in the universe and in biological systems, the mathematical and computational structure of nature, human consciousness and moral awareness. The cambrian explosion, the cataclismic structure of the fossil record, the gaps in the fossil record, the movement of continents, the ice age, the extinction of dinossaurs, the flaws in radiometric mechanisms, are just a fez of the many questions the darwinism has still to answer convincingly. I am convinced that the Bible knows more about all these topics than many people believe. Actually, the Bible knows more about everything than most people would believe. Take the example of Adolph Hitler. He wanted history to go his way. He wanted to have the final word in the destiny of the Jewish people. In this he was much inspired by Darwin, Spencer and Haeckel, when it came to "the survival of the most favored races in the struggle for life" (Darwin, sub title to the Origins of the Species). The "Cristal Night" happened in October 1938. The terrible Holocaust would soon follow. Ten years later, though, Hitler was dead and the State of Israel was being internationally recognized, to the surprise of many Jews. The begining, the course and the end of history are not for men to decide. It is up to God to decide that. We are free and responsible beings, but God never loses control of the events in history. In human history (His-Story) we are given the possibility to chose freely and responsibly to reconcile ourselves with God and follow Him, through Jesus Christ (God made flesh). If we reject that and try to to do things our way, we will end up somewhere in the garbage can of history (like the Pharao in Genesis,Judas in the New Testament, like Darwin, Marx, Hitler, Staline, Bin Laden), and will be seen as examples of what shouldn't be done. As Mark Twain said, history may not repeat itself but it very often ryhmes. The moral design and divine purpose of history make it rhyme very often, leading it always to where God wants.
7 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
This isn't thinking, they're just quoting scripture,
This review is from: Why Believe? God Exists!: Rethinking the Case for God and Christianity (Paperback)
The title makes a promise: the authors have "re-thought" the arguments FOR (a) God and (b) Christianity, and here are their conclusions. In the same title, they give us the answer: "God Exists!" With an exclamation point. Well, that takes all the fun out of it. This is a typical "Christian scholar" book. It appears to consider "all" of the information on a subject, but (a)leaves out any facts that go against their religious beliefs, and (b) the analysis is shallow. Either way, it doesn't make for a satisfying read, unless you're a high school or college student looking for something to support your parents' religious beliefs. Let's call this the "Christian Literature of Deception," because that's all it is. If you want to re-think the arguments, consider this. The recent "Left Behind" series is, basically, a 12-part serial about the End of the World. The authors base it on "Bible prophecy." Conclusion? The Bible describes the End of the World. We've seen a lot of these cults recently, particularly in Africa, where 949 people were murdered. 500 of them locked in a church and set on fire. There's one common feature: God has to deliver a revelation to the cult leader, giving a date for the end of the world. These cult members wouldn't give up everything they own for a message that didn't come from God, would they? Now, is Christianity an End of the World cult? Well, that's how it started. The author of Matthew quoted Jesus, "The world will end while some of you standing here listening to me are still alive. The Son of Man................................... ." Paul wrote, "God has chosen a day when the world will end, and the man Jesus has been assigned to judge us." Obviously, if early Christians truly believed the entire world was about to end, and they had a chance for an eternity of heavenly bliss (against the punishemnt of eternal torment by fire for heretics) all they had to do was keep the faith, even if they had to die for it. One death, no matter how nasty, doesn't equal an eternity in Paradise. When Habermas "re-thinks" the case for Christianity, he assumes that Jesus actually spoke the words attributed to him. Okay, that's one opinion, but the words of Jesus say that the Son of Man (who was not Jesus, but a popular figure in the religious fiction that Jesus read) was going to appear in the sky "before this generation passes away." Habermas asks us to believe the disciples were credible witnesses, but read Chapter 5 of Acts. A married couple have given money to the church, but held back some of it. Peter is outraged. A few hours apart, he brings the man and woman into a locked room, separately. At the end of each interrogation, a body is taken out to the back yard and buried. Peter claims, "They were cheating God." So God killed them? No, re-thinking requires us to realize that Peter killed this couple for holding back money, and their belief was founded on the dreams about Jesus that proved that the End Times had begun and the resurrection of Jesus was the "first fruits" of a general resurrection when all the dead would be raised and judged. With hindsight, we know for a fact this general resurrection didn't happen and the Son of Man didn't appear. (It would be roughly like someone predicting the return of Luke Skywalker, and then 2,000 years later, scholars getting into an argument whether Luke Skywalker really existed or not.) It isn't that Habermas doesn't quote facts; he does. But he quotes only the party line, only those "facts" that support his belief, and he never considers the overall picture, that Christianity was an End of the World cult based on the resurrection of a fallen leader who was given authority by God to judge us. No thanks, I would simply prefer not to believe this.
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