Dealing with Jesus

Spirituality Column #79
May 13, 2008
Current! in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current! in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Dealing with Jesus
By Bob Walters

Ben Stein’s recent movie Expelled presents Intelligent Design/Creation as a salient life science subverted by 150 years of incomplete yet burgeoning and now pervasive Darwinian/Evolution worldview and education.

The 1996 PBS NOVA episode titled “The Ultimate Journey,” a video on evolution commonly shown in high school biology classes with fascinating microphotography of embryos, confidently asserts itself as “The Odyssey of Life,” a veritable highlight reel of how life works. The video contains this direct quote, “We don’t know how life began.”

How odd. I know how life began; God created life, and us. The Bible lays it out in plain terms in Genesis chapters 1 and 2.

The fact that there is life because God wanted there to be life – and our trying to figure out the how and why of life based on that – is entirely different and I daresay more satisfying than evolutionists stuffily saying “we don’t know how life began” and foregoing any explanation of why life exists.

To an evolutionist, there is no “why.”

Creationism is different. That’s because the Bible is different, and Jesus is different.

Our God-given human creativity and freedom to invent secular views like evolution, humanism, and broad and competing swaths of philosophy – or conversely, to discover God, life, love, purpose, salvation, relationships and truth in the Bible – too often create conflict, not understanding. For the record, I don’t think science is specifically secular or necessarily divisive.

Discussing this with a friend from church, wondering why so many people insist on separating science and scripture, she said, “The problem is that if you deal with Creation, you have to deal with the Bible. And if you deal with the Bible, then you have to deal with Jesus … and a lot of people don’t want to go there.”

So true. The thing is, we should recognize that our individuality, uniqueness and significance all come from Jesus, not Darwin. Evolution defeats all those ideas, and Darwin doesn’t demand that we act right and love each other.

We’d all be better off dealing with Jesus, even in science class. And by all means … go to science class.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) finds dinosaur bones and carbon dating quite fascinating, but not as fascinating as his relationship with God, Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Freeing Up a Choked Debate

Spirituality Column #77
April 29, 2008
Current! In Carmel (IN) newspaper

Freeing Up a Choked Debate
By Bob Walters

I saw the movie Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed and thought it was pretty good.

What has surprised me is that the reviews and comment I’ve seen are predictably, iconoclastically “Conservative – Intelligent Design” or “Liberal – Darwinism” and have consistently missed Stein’s central point of the movie – Freedom.

Evolutionists, Atheists and anti-Creationists certainly saw – to their way of thinking, I’m sure – an unfair attack on their beloved and holy Darwinism. Believers like me were likely struck by Stein’s images, boldness and surely snickered at some of his forensic mischief and filmmaker’s license.

And I must say that the sound track was fabulous. To Yoko and her “Imagine” complaint, all I can say is “Let It Be.”

But whether I think the movie’s message is right on or someone else thinks the message is right off the loony farm, Stein began and ended the movie talking about Freedom.

Freedom. Galatians 5:1. As a Christian believer, and an American, I want to stop right there and drink in the elegance of focusing on Freedom in a debate about science. And religion.

Religion is a quest for Truth. Science is a quest for Truth. Both require freedom of honest inquiry to establish Truth, or you wind up with idolatry and demagoguery, not religion and science. You have Political Correctness, not Truth.

What is Truth? That’s easy. It’s in the Bible. John 14:6. Jesus Christ is the Truth.

And how Darwin got to be more politically correct than Christ I do not know.

Stein addressed science, but mainly he was talking about Freedom; Freedom which I interpret as being of ultimate importance to our relationship with God and its utter necessity in our search for Him.

Trotting out the Bible as the ultimate science book is not satisfying, because our God-given thirst for discovery requires us to investigate beyond the relationship Truths of Genesis-to-Revelation. Yet the church cannot define science without stifling human creativity (look at the Dark Ages). When science stifles the church, you have, well … today.

Our creativity is an absolutely essential part of our humanity Christ came to redeem. How else can we discover Him?

We all want Freedom for our own point of view. If we battle to preserve Freedom on all fronts, religion and science will take care of themselves.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) figures our purpose in life is our quest for God, and our pursuit of Truth. We find both in Christ.

Intelligent Movie - Expelled

Spirituality Column # 75
April 15, 2008
Current! In Carmel (IN) Newspaper

Intelligent Movie
By Bob Walters

Everybody knows Ben Stein. Everybody loves Ben Stein.

That may be about to change.

He reveals himself this week as a very dangerous first class thinker.

Stein’s new docu-movie, Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed (www.expelledthemovie.com), is in theaters Friday, April 18. If it lives up to its billing, the Darwinist crowd is going to start sleeping not so well.

And will blame Stein for their pain.

Stein is Jewish (note: Genesis is Jewish). He was an author, philosopher and presidential speechwriter before playing quirky characters in movies (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), commercials (FedEx) and as host of the TV game show “Win Ben Stein’s Money.”

This week Stein swings a big, smart hammer on the topic of Intelligent Design, or ID. Expelled supports the very wise, very elite, courageous and very much growing crowd of scientists and thinkers who have concluded, completely opposite the politically correct Darwinists, that there is no way the Cosmos, Earth and Humanity just “happened” as a big, pointless, amoral cosmic freak of nature.

No, Stein insists: an intelligent designer, a creator, a moral force, ahem … God … is the only rational way to explain how and why we are all here.

Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, call your office. Better yet, call your doctor; this movie is going to make you sick.

Mimicking the genre of Michael Moore’s silly attack pieces on common sense (Fahrenheit 911, Sicko) only without Moore’s disingenuous editing tricks, Expelled pushes back at the 150-year-old Darwinian trend of eliminating God – the “Intelligent Designer” – from serious scientific and philosophical discussion.

Routinely teachers are fired, professors are denied tenure, science magazine editors are ridiculed and scientists are denied funding – all Expelled – because they examine, for example, a human cell and authoritatively conclude, “that couldn’t have just happened.”

Expelled also scrutinizes Darwinism’s devastating moral effect on humanity. Survival of the fittest? Look up “Nazism.”

Christians will champion this movie because it effectively and cogently discusses ID without it being portrayed as the grist of close-minded, monosyllabic country bumpkins. The Jews should like it because Darwinists are messing with Genesis 1-2-3, the beginning of the Torah.

The atheists and Darwinists aren’t going to fare so well.

Go see this one. It will, hopefully, begin to change the way true intelligence, and truth, are viewed … for the good.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) recommends that you read Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator.