Gregory Koukl Template:Co-cul (born June 10, 1950) is a Christian apologist, radio talk show host, author, speaker, and the founder of the Christian apologetics organization Stand To Reason.
A worldview is simply someone's relatively organized understanding of what the world is actually like.
You may be a fantastic person, and you may have some wonderful religious views that might even turn out to be true, but the religion you'd be following would not be Christianity.
Nowadays, people have a habit of relativizing religion, reducing it to "your truth" versus "my truth" versus "their truth," and that's the end of it.
Whenever someone tries to deny the truth, ultimately, reality betrays him.
God existed before He made anything else, and He Himself was never made. God is eternal.
Christianity is actually "true Truth," as Francis Schaeffer used to put it. God really does exist, Heaven actually is real (along with Hell), Jesus really did live and He did the things the historical records - the Gospels - say He did, the resurrection of Christ really happened, and there really is hope each of us can count on for "the kind of perfect world our hearts have always longed for. "
Man had freedom to choose the good, but this same freedom also allowed him to choose the bad. This is called moral freedom.
I want people to see that Christianity claims to be true in the deep sense, and if it isn't, then it solves nothing at all.
There is no neutral ground when it comes to the tolerance question. Everybody has a point of view she thinks is right, and everybody passes judgment at some point or another. The Christian gets pigeonholed as the judgmental one, but everyone else is judging, too, even people who consider themselves relativists.
So let's set the record straight. Faith is not the opposite of reason. The opposite of faith is unbelief. And reason is not the opposite of faith. The opposite of reason is irrationality. Do some Christians have irrational faith? Sure. Do some skeptics have unreasonable unbelief? You bet. It works both ways.
Wisdom is an artful method—a skillful, tactical, fair, and diplomatic use of knowledge.
Almost everyone agrees the world is not the way it ought to be. It's called the problem of evil.
Two things have been bothering me for a long time. The first is the tendency of people in general - and that includes Christians - to "relativize" religion. Any religious belief is only "true for," so to speak - true for you or true for me or true for those people on the other side of the world. Second, I've been bothered by how poorly believers understand their own Story. They have bits and pieces, of course, but they're missing enough that they can easily become prey to ideas that sound spiritual, but end up being foolishness in the end.
An alternate explanation is not a refutation.
When God's children disobeyed their heavenly Father, they damaged everything. When Adam and Eve rebelled against the King of the universe, they broke the whole world. This is why there is evil and suffering. Bad things happen in a world that's broken.
I'm hoping that The Story of Reality will fill in more details for the Christian believer and will create a crisis of faith for the nonbeliever.
In the Story of Reality man does not rescue himself for his own glory. Instead, God rescues man for His glory. Every other story describes what man needs to do to fix himself and save him from whatever else is wrong with the world.
The word "Christian" means something in particular. The basic outline and general truths and doctrines central to Christianity have been hammered out over 2000 years of reflection on the teachings of Jesus and his apostles. If you disagree with these foundational concerns - the kinds of things I focus on in The Story of Reality - then you're simply not a Christian.
If Darwinism is true, then there is no purpose or meaning to life, there is no morality, there's no qualitative difference between humans and animals, there's no life after death, and there's no purpose to human history. Now, are you trying to tell me that it doesn't really matter if people believe we evolved or not?
In the Story of Reality a man is a helpless slave - enslaved to his own passions, the flesh, and enslaved to a cruel master, the devil - a slave who God Himself rescues and adopts into His own family. It is the very worst news coupled with the very best news.