oddXian: Challenge the Consensus

I put this together to address the topic of: “What about all those people who have never heard the Gospel? Are they going to Hell?” The concept of the independent action of the Holy Spirit provides a compelling Biblical basis for the possibility of salvation for those who have not explicitly heard the Gospel message.  Let's explore this further: 1. The Holy Spirit's role in salvation - Scripture teaches that the Holy Spirit plays a vital role in bringing people to salvation. He convicts people of sin (John 16:8), reveals Christ (John 15:26), regenerates hearts (Titus 3:5), and draws people to the Father (John 6:44). This suggests that the Spirit's work is not necessarily limited to the proclamation of the verbal Gospel message. 2. The Holy Spirit's sovereignty - The Bible affirms that the Holy Spirit is God and possesses all divine attributes, including sovereignty. He distributes spiritual gifts "to each one individually as He wills" (1 Corinthians 12:11). Hi...

There are a lot more “quiet Christians” out there trying to live out Jesus’ character and love their neighbors than the microcosm of fringe weirdos, mega-“pastors”, and “Christian” politicians you see in public forums, like on X, Facebook, TikTok, or Reddit. Sadly, the fringe are the ones most likely to get attention. The truth is, most humans thrive on drama and outrage, because it gives them a sense of purpose and meaning. People love a “cause” and to feel and express “righteous anger”. I will confess, I have been guilty of initiating or promoting outrage and drama, myself. In fact, the process of typing out this message caused me to reexamine my own approach. For reasons above, it’s probably too much to hope that the tone in public forums would be more civil, just like it’s too much to hope that Christians would be more civil, too. Christ reserved His strongest criticism and true righteous anger for internal issues and showed love, concern, and respect for everyone else. We’d do wel...

Introduction The question of life's origins and the mechanisms behind biological complexity and diversity is one of the most profound and consequential in all of science and philosophy. The conventional evolutionary paradigm, rooted in Darwinian theory and the neo-Darwinian synthesis, posits that all life on Earth descended from a common ancestor through a process of unguided modification by natural selection acting on random genetic variations [1]. However, a careful examination of the evidence and a rigorous application of the principles of rational inference suggest that this materialistic framework is inadequate to fully account for the intricacies of the living world [2, 3]. An alternative paradigm, intelligent design (ID), which proposes that certain features of the universe and living systems are best explained by an intelligent cause, merits serious consideration as a better explanation for the origins and development of life [4, 5]. Evidentiary Challenges to Conventional E...

“While each view has philosophical merits, I believe Christian theism has greater explanatory scope and power and offers more existential and pragmatic benefits than atheism. The self-revelation of God in Christ and the historical evidence for His resurrection are compelling. While both views face difficulties, I find the atheist's universe of cosmic drudgery bleaker than the theist's universe of ultimate meaning, value, hope, and joy grounded in a perfectly good Creator who desires a relationship with us. But these are my thoughts and I respect the right of others to disagree and draw different conclusions.” oddXian.com

The idea that the universe and its exquisite fine-tuning is the product of "self-organization" or "self-cause" is a woefully inadequate and logically incoherent attempt to explain away what is more reasonably attributed to the intentional activity of a transcendent intelligent Creator. As philosopher William Lane Craig argues, "The most plausible answer to the question of why something exists rather than nothing is that there is a necessarily existent being, God, who is the ground of being for everything else that exists." (Craig, 2008, p. 182) The concept of "self-organization" posits that the staggeringly complex and finely-calibrated cosmos arose through mindless, unguided processes - that the unimaginably precise initial conditions and physical constants required for a life-permitting universe all fell into place by sheer chance or some inscrutable naturalistic mechanism. But as philosopher and mathematician William Dembski notes, "The a...

TL;DR: The extremely low probability of a life-permitting universe points to design rather than chance. Appealing to infinite time or a multiverse to explain fine-tuning is an ad hoc move to rescue naturalism, not unlike a "God of the gaps" argument. Positing a purposeful God as the cosmic designer is a simpler and more illuminating explanation for the extraordinary fine-tuning of our universe than an infinite multiverse generator. The "God of the gaps" charge cuts both ways, and "God in the system" is the more parsimonious and compelling explanation given the evidence. “We know the probability of an intelligible, life-enabling, finely-tuned universe is essentially 0, given the amount of time evidence, so we fill the gap with more time.” The extraordinarily low probability of a life-permitting universe by chance alone seems to point to design or intention rather than mere happenstance. Physicist Roger Penrose calculated the odds of a low-entropy initial st...