Last month, conservative writer Rod Dreher came out with a book entitled, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. Now, I had no idea who Rod Dreher was or what the book was about. I stumbled across it while thumbing through my twitterfeed one day. While flipping through Twitter, I happened…
As one should be able to see from the last number of posts, the 19th century was a pivotal century. There was the struggle for the soul of European Christianity, there was the birth of Marxism, there was Darwin’s theory of evolution, and there was Nietzsche’s maddening philosophical hammer. And amidst all that, poets, novelists,…
When I was in college, I fell in love with poetry and literature, and some of the most influential literature I came across of that of the 19th century Romantics and Transcendentalists. In my freshman and sophomore years, American writers like Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson sparked my imagination, and then it was on…
The other day, I received a short note from someone who had a question regarding one of my posts on Ken Ham. He asked, “Since Ken Ham says that the evidence for YEC is all a matter of interpretation, is he subtly admitting that either YEC has no evidence (like he claims evolution doesn’t) or…
There is one more 19th century philosopher I want to draw our attention to: the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). When Kierkegaard died in 1855, Darwin had not yet published Origin of Species, Nietzsche was merely 11 years old, and Marx, still smarting from the failure of a full-fledged proletariat revolution in 1848, had been…
Deism, Enlightenment thought, the influence of the industrial revolution, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx…with a little bit of Darwin thrown in—with all this going on in the 19th century, onto the world stage stepped Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was to 19th century European thought what the atomic bomb was to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the thing one…
In the last few posts, I have been going into detail about Charles Darwin, and his books, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. And whereas I have tried to emphasize that the theory of evolution is a valid scientific theory that is not a threat to the Bible or Christianity, I have…
If my previous two posts about Charles Darwin has come across as a validation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, it should, at least partly. The point I wanted to make was that one must make a clear distinction between the biological/scientific theory of evolution and the philosophical/naturalistic worldview of Social Darwinism. The two are not…
If you follow the current creation/evolution debate, chances are that you might not really understand what the theory of evolution actually states. And if you are a Christian (particularly one who has been influenced by YECists like Ken Ham), you probably have assumed that Charles Darwin was an atheist who came up with his theory…
When I was hired back in 2003 at a Christian high school in Arkansas, I was hired to teach mostly English, but also one class in “Worldview.” Specifically, I was to teach Senior Worldview—a class that looked at the major thinkers of the modern world. There was a unit on Karl Marx and a unit…