The creation account of Gen 1 ends with the declaration, “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:31 ESV). The key issue boils down to what is meant by the expression “very good.” Old-earth creationists and young-earth creationists agree that this is the issue about which they have the most disagreement. More…
Sam Storms has compiled his list of the top twenty books of 2014, and he places 40 Questions about Creation and Evolution at number two. Mark Rooker and I wrote the book for Kregel under the editorial direction of Ben Merkle. Sam says a lot of very nice things about 40 Questions, such as “I’ve been waiting for a book…
The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard lived a brief life (of only 42 years) in Denmark in the 19th century. In his Philosophical Fragments, he tells a parable entitled “The King and the Maiden” in an attempt to explain some of God’s motivations behind the Incarnation. The parable goes like this (as retold by David Jeremiah): Imagine there was a King who…
Thomas Nagel is one of the premier philosophers living today. This is one reason why his recent criticisms of Darwinism have caused such a stir. In his latest book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly Wrong, Nagel argues that materialism is incapable of explaining the phenomena of human consciousness. One thing that makes…
Unless you’ve been in a coma for the last twenty years, you know who John Mayer is. He displays an enormous musical talent, and evidently possesses an ego to match. Think of him what you will, one would be hard pressed to find a better song writer alive today. Some of his lyrics reveal insights that go beyond pop pablum….
Two weeks ago I attended a “Celebrating Creation” conference hosted by the BioLogos Foundation. As many readers know, BioLogos is an organization of evangelicals who accept theistic evolution (or evolutionary creationism, EC, as many prefer to call it). Evangelicals hold to a wide range of views concerning creation and evolution, and I’ve had the privilege of engaging with a number…
By God’s providence, Penny and I were visiting family in Missouri this weekend when we received news that my Grandma Lottie had passed away. Grandma was unique in so many ways. One fact that made her special was that she was the widow of a World War I veteran. That’s not a misprint. Grandpa Street was a veteran of WWI,…
Jamie Cullum is one of my favorite musicians. He sings and plays jazz piano with a lighted-hearted, likable style. If you’ve never heard him, his Twentysomething album is a great place to start. In it, Cullum covers everyone from Cole Porter to Jimi Hendrix. But it’s an original track written by Cullum–“I’m a Twentysomething”–that perceptively expresses the quandary in which…
When thinking about the mystery of God–whether contemplating His nature, His character, or the facets of His will–one quickly finds himself muttering Rumsfeldian quotes. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, talking about military intelligence, (in) famously observed, “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns;…
The Japanese have stopped having children. Or more precisely, they are not having enough children to maintain the nation’s population. According to a recent article in The Week magazine (“Japan’s Population Crisis”, 01-07-14, p. 11), Japan’s population is “dropping rapidly” and will soon be declining at a rate of one million per year. Current projections have the overall Japanese population…