God's Existence, Science and Faith, Suffering and Evil, Jesus' Resurrection, and Book Reviews

Christians Consuming Questionable Media

So many movies and TV shows that promote worldviews that are not inline with Christianity (some blatantly anti-Christian) are coming out these days. I'm a big special effects guy. So any movie or show that will have lots of computer generated graphics tends to lure me. I love to see how accurately the effects are portraying reality. When I see the simulation of physics (movements) and electromagnitism (light) so close to the real world that its difficult to tell the difference, I get really excited. I love to see artistic talent used to imitate reality. I also like to see fictional worlds that contain phenomena that do not exist in reality. The level of design, talent, and time that I see behind this stuff leaves me in awe. I can't help but think of how the Christian worldview is really the only one that can explain the existence of something so arbitrary to survival as creativity, and how that creativity is evidence of the Image of God in every person. 

Reasons In and Out of a Worldview

"I believe that anyone sincerely seeking Truth is going to find it. The problem is, most people are not looking for Truth, they are looking for evidence to support their assumptions. It takes a lot of humility to actually pursue Truth sincerely."- Rachel Oja*

In so many of my interactions with people, I have found that they have already made a commitment one way or the other to certain worldviews and are looking for intellectual reasons to either maintain that commitment, be public about the commitment or escape another commitment. I know people who are ready to accept any worldview except for X and others who are committed to accepting any form of worldview Y. Some are currently in worldview Z but are looking for intellectual reasons to either remain in or to get out.

I have found that Christianity is not immune to this observation. Some people are looking to get in but need intellectual reasons, while other are looking to get out but need intellectual reasons. I have seen people leave Christianity because someone asked them "well, who created God?". I have seen people come to Christianity for "fire insurance". Neither of those being logical reasons.

Multiverse and Rationality

Something that I was thinking about the other day: some people are familiar with Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism. Basically it states that because people believe false things that help survivability (such as "god", from the naturalist's perspective), evolution does not favor minds that recognize truth, but minds that recognize how to survive- if a belief just happens to be true, it is pure coincidence.

However, I was contemplating the multiverse (or multiple worlds) hypothesis, and it seems that this only compounds the problem. For those uninitiated, multiverse theory states that our universe is not the only universe there is. There are many other universes that do exist; however, our instruments cannot detect them because they are outside our universe. This theory comes in several flavors, but the one I am talking about is the one that is capable of explaining the fine-tuning and design in the universe, along with being an alternative to God as the "banger" that the cosmological argument requires. In order to account for the fine-tuning of the physical constants of the universe, some naturalists posit that there are an infinite (or near infinite) number of universes, each possessing different constants of physics. Ours just happens to be the one that is amenable to advanced life, and that is why we exist to observe the "fine-tuning".