Tim Keller's powerful book on pain and suffering

I like all the books Tim Keller, pastor in New York City, has written. His Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering has so much to say to all of us. I want to spend several blogs highlighting his comments.

In one of his opening chapters, Keller talks about the different way cultures handle the problem of pain and suffering. Cultures train their members for grief, pain, and loss. Western culture does a terrible job. It gives its members no explanation for suffering and very little guidance on how to deal with it. Today we are more shocked and undone by suffering than our ancestors were. Other cultures say suffering can be a way of achieving your purpose in life, but not so in secular Western culture. According to the secular view, this material world is all there is. And so you must have freedom to choose the life that makes you most happy. However, suffering can have no meaningful part and must be avoided. It sees suffering as an accident. The world is senseless with no such thing as good and evil. All other cultures make the highest purpose of life something besides individual happiness and comfort, things that can be achieved not only in spite of suffering but through it. But if the meaning of life is individual freedom and happiness, then suffering is of no possible use.

One of the implications of this view is that the responsibility for responding to suffering is taken away from the sufferer. Traditional cultures believe that the main responsibility in dark times belongs to the sufferers themselves. They need to work on patience, wisdom, and faithfulness. Today the secular model puts sufferers in the hands of experts, but they don't agree on what to do to alleviate the problem.

In a secular society there are only two things to do when pain and suffering occur – manage and lessen the pain, look for the cause of the pain and eliminate it. Older cultures looked inside for fixes, but Western people are often simply outraged by their suffering. Sufferers in the West are not told that their primary work is any internal adjustment, learning, or growth. 

So how does Christianity fit into the cultural views on suffering? Christianity, unlike Buddhism, says suffering is real. Unlike believers in karma, Christians believe that suffering is often unjust and disproportionate. The Christian understanding of suffering is dominated by the idea of grace. Christianity teaches that suffering is overwhelming, it is real, it is unfair, but it is meaningful. There is a purpose to it, and having faced it rightly, can drive us more deeply into the love of God and into more stability and spiritual power thansanyone can imagine. For suffering, Buddhism says accept it, karma says pay it, fatalism says heroically endure it, secularism says avoid or fix it. Christians say all of these approaches may have some truth, but they are too simple. While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life's joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world's sorrows, tasting the coming joy.

And another thing about global warming . . .

I've been doing some more reading about global warming. The facts seem to challenge the hysteria of the warmists who think the sky is falling.

According to most people I read, there is no dispute regarding the fact that climate changes and does so for many reasons. In fact the past century has witnessed two distinct periods of warming and cooling. The first warming occurred between 1900 and 1945. Since CO₂ levels were relatively low then compared with now, and didn’t change much, they couldn’t have been the cause before 1950. Well, there goes the current theory, which blames the rise on carbon dioxide output, which is higher now than the period between 1900-1945.

The second warming shift began in 1975 and rose at quite a constant rate until 1998. Now here's something interesting about this finding: it is reported only by surface thermometers, not satellites, and is legitimately disputed by some.

This recent warming (up until a recent 17-year “pause”) is part of a pretty constant trend of temperature increases ever since the last “Little Ice Age” (not a true Ice Age), which ended in about 1850.

A Nature journal article titled “The Case of the Missing Heat” by Jeff  Tollefson reviews research on why “the warming stalled” in 1998. He reports “the pause has persisted, sparking a minor crisis of confidence in the field.”Tollefson then claims that: “climate skeptics have seized on the temperature trends as evidence that global warming has ground to a halt. Climate scientists, meanwhile, know that the heat must be building up somewhere in the climate system, but they have struggled to explain where it is going, if not into the atmosphere.” His conclusion is revealing: “Some have begun to wonder whether there is something amiss in their [climate] models.”

Other sharp climate scientists think that we shouldn't worry about global warming since we have a very different future ahead. For example,  Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov who heads Russia’s prestigious Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg predicts that: “after the maximum of solar Cycle-24, from approximately 2014, we can expect the start of the next bicentennial cycle of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age in 2055 plus or minus 11 years” (the 19th to occur in the past 7,500 years). Did you catch that? A cooling may be coming our way.

Abdussamatov and others primarily link their cooling predictions to a 100-year record low number of sunspots. Periods of reduced sunspot activity correlate with increased cloud-forming influences of cosmic rays. More clouds tend to make conditions cooler, while fewer often cause warming.  He points out that Earth has experienced such occurrences five times over the last 1,000 years, and that: “A global freeze will come about regardless of whether or not industrialized countries put a cap on their greenhouse gas emissions. The common view of Man’s industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect.”

All I can say is "Wow." Let's be careful before we ruin our economy to fix something that may not need fixing.

The problem with global warming--it may be bigger than we think (but that's OK with me)

There’s a new article out  by Garth Paltridge, one of the world’s most respected atmospheric scientists. He was a Chief Research Scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).  The latter is Australia’s equivalent of the National Science Foundation, our massive Federal Laboratory network, and all the governmental agency science branches rolled into one. He has interesting things to say about the current “climate change” controversy.

First, Paltridge lays out the well-known uncertainties in climate forecasting. These include our inability to properly simulate clouds that are anything like what we see in the real world, the embarrassing lack of average surface warming now in its 17th year, and the fumbling (and contradictory) attempts to explain it away. He notes “…the average man in the street, a sensible chap who by now can smell the signs of an oversold environmental campaign from miles away, is beginning to suspect that it is politics rather than science which is driving the issue.” Amen!!

He points out how science changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the reward structure in the profession began to revolve around the acquisition of massive amounts of taxpayer funding that was external to the normal budgets of the universities and federal laboratories. In climate science, this meant portraying the issue in dire terms, often in alliance with environmental advocacy organizations. Predictably, scientists (and their institutions) became addicted to the wealth, fame, and travel in the front of the airplane. Paltidge says, “A new and rewarding research lifestyle emerged which involved the giving of advice to all types and levels of government, the broadcasting of unchallengeable opinion to the general public, and easy justification for attendance at international conferences—this last in some luxury by normal scientific experience, and at a frequency previously unheard of.”

He is sad for the consequences of poor predictions. Every year that elapses without a significant warming trend more and more erodes the credibility of not just climate science, but science in general: “In the light of all this, we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem—or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem—in its effort to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavour.”

So science itself may become less in the eyes of the public. He bemoans this, but I don’t. We have been sold the idea that science solves all problems and answers the big questions of life. Not true. Most of the things I hold dear (God, my family, friends, love, freedom, . . .) have nothing to do with science.

Flash--political bombshell!!

By now I'm sure you've heard the bad news, but I wanted to share it with you in case you missed it. It's devastating to Obamacare fans (are there any?).

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released an updated analysis of the controversial Affordable Care Act. As predicted by its conservative opponents, Obamacare has indeed destroyed jobs, increased spending, and made health care less accessible.
 

 So here it it--I'll keep it plain so you can spread the word easily to others. The CBO says Obamacare will destroy 2.5 million jobs by 2024, in the same year there will still be about 31 million people without health insurance (the same as right now),  millions will lose the health care plan they have now, the plans will cost you more, and taxes will rise to pay for it all.

OK, that's it. Short and not so sweet. This is Obama's legacy--a liberal/progressive attempt to have the government control our health care system. Let's remember this as we go to the polls this year and in 2016.

Our apologetics class

So last week we started our sixth year of apologetics classes at our church. Looks like a good group of people eager to learn and share ideas. Here's what we covered as an introduction to apologetics.

I shared a motto that might be good for the group: "Answering seekers, equipping Christians, and demonstrating the truth of the Christian worldview." In other words, we want to have answers rather than saying we just believe it and that's enough. In addition, we want to equip Christians so that they are not deceived by false doctrines. Finally, we want to talk about the Christian worldview as truth to a world that doesn't believe in truth anymore. The key word there is "worldview"– we want our beliefs to permeate all parts of our lives, not just on Sunday.

We took a look at some verses in the New Testament that support apologetics. If you have some time, you might want to check out 1 Peter 3:15, Colossians 2:8 and 4:5-6, as well as 2 Corinthians 5:20 and 10:5. They challenge Christians to have ready answers, to use apologetics defensively, and to use it to  attack false doctrines.

We then covered the value of apologetics. We want to change the culture, show the value of truth to society that has lost its ability to talk about truth, show that Christians can think, and draw people to Jesus.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of misconceptions and confusion when it comes to apologetics. It does not mean we have to argue with people, we need to realize that all Christians are supposed to be involved in this field, it should be carried out with kindness, our job is not to save people (that's up to God), we are to bloom where we are planted, we need to admit it when we have no answer, and we have to realize that often the person challenging knows very little about the topic he or she brought up.

We ended with a challenge from J. Warner Wallace. He said we need to get into the game; our culture is growing very dark. We must also spend more time learning and less time vegetating in front of the television. We need to know what our strengths are so that we can focus on using apologetics there. My goal is that this apologetics session will encourage Christians to use their gifts and make a real difference in the lives of people around them.