God. Real. Right.

Here is the next message from the book of James, this one on the whole of chapter 3. Yes, it was probably too much to cover in a single sermon. I delivered it as interim pastor at First Baptist, Madisonville, TX. This passage confronts those of us who speak with forked tongues–praising God but belittling other people. In reality, any help we can actually give others toward God’s concerns will come in the form of reconciliation, not judgment.
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In one of his famous letters to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson makes the case that when arguing for the existence of God the teleological argument is better than the cosmological argument. His reasoning is straightforward and dependent on the rise of science’s authority in the world of his day.
The cosmological argument traditionally claims that the universe must be caused by something, and the thing that causes it is God. (A very brief but better form of the argument is here.) But Jefferson objects with a foundational principle of the scientific worldview, the law of parsimony (Occam’s Razor). If a scientifically minded person must choose between Read the rest of this entry »