Bridge of Reason

  It is popularly believed that Christians, when we go to church, hang our brains up at the door. Yet it is my experience that when I try and engage unbelievers in intelligent conversation about great issues of faith, it is so often they who shut down their thinking, who refuse to intelligently engage. This is because they have already decided faith has nothing to offer by way of intelligent conversation. Of course, this is a poor caricature of faith as being by nature unreasonable, like superstition. You either have it, or you don’t, and who can explain it? It’s rather embarrassing, and who would admit to it? An example I think of is that of creation. However you understand the Bible creation narrative, one thing is certain, the universe had a beginning. Science tells us that space, time, and matter came into being at the same moment. There was nothing, then there was...well, everything. That makes the universe contingent. Think of oak trees. If you see an acorn, you would be f...

  Jehovah's Witnesses insist Jesus is a created being, the first to be created, the one who created 'all other things.' Of the opening verses of John's gospel they write : 'The “beginning” referred to in this verse cannot mean “the beginning” of God, because God had no beginning. Jehovah God is “from everlasting to everlasting.” (Psalm 90:1, 2) However, the Word, Jesus Christ, did have a beginning. He is “the beginning of the creation by God.”—Revelation 3:14.' What is 'the beginning' referring to in John 1:1? Did Jesus Christ have a beginning? Is the NWT accurate and reliable when it translates Revelation 3:14, 'the beginning of the creation by God'? In the beginning was [ εἰμ ί ( eimi) , Gk. ‘to be’] the Word – Genesis is in mind here, Jehovah’s Witnesses say as much when they teach God made Jesus and Jesus made ‘all other things,’ as Colossians 2 doesn’t say, but does in their NWT. Note, Jesus ‘was’ in the beginning; he didn’t begin to be....

  In the Reasoning book p.408 the Watch Tower ask: 'Does the Bible teach that all who are said to be part of the Trinity are eternal, none having a beginning?' They point out Jesus, in Col. 1:15,16, is referred to as 'the first born of all creation,' making the point, 'if the Trinity doctrine is true, why are the Father and the holy spirit not also said to be the firstborn of all creation? But the Bible applies this expression only to the Son.' 'Firstborn' in Scripture always refers to a creature, each after its own kind.’ At the heart of this question is the Jehovah’s Witness’ s consistent misunderstanding of the Trinity. You can only ask this question if you think the Trinity doctrine understands all three members of the Trinity are the same person. We looked at this last time . Let’s state again: The doctrine of the Trinity may be summed like this: (1) The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct Persons (2) each Person is fully God (3)...

  In our latest Watchtower Wednesday on the Facebook page we saw that, according to Watchtower teaching, Jesus is the first creature God created. On their website they write: 'God created Jesus before creating Adam. In fact, God created Jesus and then used him to make everything else, including the angels. That is why the Bible calls Jesus “the firstborn of all creation” by God,—Read Colossians 1:15, 16.' It is worth noting that anyone new to a faith, any faith, has a lot to take in and is understandably not especially discerning. They put a lot of trust in the people teaching them and this places a huge responsibility on those teachers (James.3:1). The new Jehovah’s Witness will typically look at this explanation of Colossians 1:15,16 and feel they are having a lightbulb moment. ‘ That makes sense,’ they might think, uncritically embracing this new knowledge. Sadly for Jehovah’s Witnesses, the organisation strives to keep them in this infant state, where their minds a...

This is a very disturbing documentary for, amongst others, the following reasons (from most to least obvious): Racism is alive and punching in the UK The abolition of corporal punishment has proved disastrous Islam is an incredibly destructive force The BBC1 documentary follows two British Muslims who go undercover for eight weeks, posing as an Asian couple in a Bristol housing estate. They are constantly abused, harassed, sworn at, racially slurred, sneered at, subject to missiles of glass and brick, threatened, mugged, reduced to tears and actually physically thumped. It makes one sick to be white and British, and stiffens one's resolve (if it needed any stiffening) against the BNP and Nick Griffin's slippery attempts to sanitise its inalienably racist platform. Firstly, then, the most obvious conclusion is that racism is not dead in the UK, despite Trevor Phillips' assurance that nobody has a problem nowadays living next door to someone of a different ethnicity. Mancunia...

The August 2009 edition of the official Mormon Ensign magazine emphasises prayer and it would be ungracious not to recognise the wise counsel to set aside time to pray regularly, to make prayer a discipline and to approach it in a spirit of humility; surely advice with which all Christians can agree. Yet it demonstrates something Christians often notice about the Mormon ethos, which is that it is based on Joseph Smith and not Jesus Christ, whose church Mormons claim to have restored. In an article entitled Opening the Heavens Elder Yoshihiko Kikuchu of the Seventy asks, “ Do you want to feel the love of God powerfully in your life? Do you want to feel more in tune with His Spirit? Do you want to have the heavens opened to you daily?” He goes on to let us in on the secret of achieving these things using examples from the life of Joseph Smith. Like Joseph, we must take ourselves apart to spend time with God. Like Joseph, we can expect God to answer. Like Joseph, we can have o...

The Big Questions , 27 July 2009, BBC1. I must say, I hand it to this programme for coming up with a very stimulating variety of topics. Chimps and bonobos, apparently, share 98.4% of our DNA and their blood and organs can be harvested for human use. (I did a simple Google, however, and found the DNA similarity may be more like 95% .) The first expert questioned is Professor Colin Blakemore , whom presenter Nicky Campbell challenges concerning whether a creature than can articulate (via symbols) the phrase, "Can I have an ice cream on my birthday?" should not, in fact, be given rights. The professor replies that simian linguistics is a highly controversial field, and that the conferring of rights in theory is not the same as creating a fairer world (as can already be seen amongst us humans!). Campbell then brings out the crunch question: are we part of a 'continuum' along with apes, or do we have a special, divinely-conferred status? The former, says Professor Paula C...