[asa] TE Evangelism...

For those of you desiring to see more evangelism from the TE camp, I am sharing an excerpt of Fred Heeren's newsletter this month, who embodies this attribute remarkably in my opinion.

You can receive the full newsletter by requesting it from daystar@day-star.org.

John

7 do’s and don’ts — a review

1. Don’t fall for the idea promoted by Richard Dawkins, who says that if there’s a God, we should be able to find Him through science. The ID people keep promoting this idea, too.
Do promote an accurate understanding of science: that it has its limits.

Why do I say this? Human experience is broader than the realm of science, and it includes things like art, love, humor, and faith. We humans have created this thing called science and purposely limited it to questions that are objectively measurable and repeatable and generally, physical. Creationists have taken this as a personal affront, as have many secular humanists, but it’s simply a way of helping us keep our biases out of this particular subject.

2. Don’t encourage people to limit the handiwork of God to His interruptions of nature. That’s not what David had in mind when he said that the heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of His hands.

Do encourage them to see God’s handiwork in nature itself, just as they find it.

What do I mean by this? By limiting themselves to the interruptions of nature, the extremists on both sides—the atheists on one far side and the creationists on the other—will both miss God’s handiwork while looking right at it.

So instead of picking a fight, how about we start with a commonsense fact that we can all agree on, like: the cosmos is orderly. Now we don’t have to take scientists to court over this, and we don’t have to try to change science. The literal meaning of “cosmos” is order, after all. The ancient Greeks, who first coined the term to mean order, and all people, naturally recognize the tremendous order we see in nature. And this is just the beginning of the many things we can agree on. We can make greater headway in witnessing to educated skeptics when we gently use the nature we both know to point them to the Lord, rather than using some strange interpretations of science that scare them away.

3. Don’t contribute to the materialist’s cause and help them promote the warfare model, the idea that people must choose between faith and mainstream science.

Do mention that people like Francis Collins and Simon Conway Morris have no trouble accepting both mainstream science and Jesus Christ as their personal Savior.

4. Don’t expect to make any progress with skeptics by bringing up controversial and confrontational statements from the four or five Intelligent Design scientists.

Do become acquainted with more helpful statements from mainstream scientists, like Simon Conway Morris, who draws our attention to the direction we can see in life’s formative history, as in the convergence between so many marsupial and placental animals widely separated in time and space. He also draws our attention to the fact that sponges, without nerves, are already equipped with neuronal receptors, so that he calls them “animals in waiting.” And he draws our attention to another primitive animal’s genes for organs it doesn’t yet possess, which he says “reveal a vertebrate in waiting.”

5. Don’t lose your faith over the progression of hominids in the fossil record.

Do think of those hominids as a case of “humans in waiting,” as more evidence for God’s amazing, unfolding plan.

6. Don’t restrict your thinking about God’s planning in nature to whatever’s most popular among evangelicals at the moment.

Do learn from history. Remember how popular expectations among 17th-century Christians (for what nature’s design ought to look like) changed, shifted in that century, from the idea that God’s design could be recognized as a Platonic force and that fossils grew in the earth to replicate living forms, to the idea that God’s handiwork should be taken at face value: stones shaped like seashells really had been seashells at one time—even if they were different from today’s seashells and even if this meant that animals had become extinct and changed over time.

7. Don’t limit God’s ways to our ways or expect that His designs will be recognized because they’ll look like our human designs.

Do expect to often find designs in nature that are beyond our human designs. Do expect Him to create things that last far beyond human lifespans, things that can grow and develop and adapt to changing conditions, unlike our engineerings that are shorter term, rigid, and immutable.

Then we can learn about, and join in, and rejoice in, the major recent discoveries in biology. Specifically, as we explained in some detail in our last info-report, we can praise God for organisms designed, not just with specified complexity that skeptics dispute, but designed with economy and flexibility, designed in ways that everyone can see, designed for change by:

§ Changing the time, place, or amount of one little chemical signal,
§ Exploratory behavior we see that explains the growth of microtubules, nerves, veins, and muscles so that these end up just where they need to be,
§ Extreme flexibility through weak linkage and modularity, and
§ Mutations of recessive genes that allow new traits to be passed on without a new kind of animal having to go through a “hopeful monster” stage.

So do begin learning about this very different kind of design that’s more flexible, more robust, more economical, more creative, than our designs, because this differentiates God from us, rather than bringing God down to our level, and it’s this differentiation that glorifies God. He does things we can’t do, in ways beyond our ways. And this is one of the ways nature truly declares the glory of God.

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Received on Tue Nov 11 16:16:18 2008