Miracles Don’t Violate the Laws of Nature

The ideas of a Scottish skeptic explain why some Westerners struggle to embrace signs and wonders.

Why do many people embrace a worldview that won’t even consider evidence for miracles? Sometimes they assume that science opposes miracles, but that assumption goes back not to scientific inquiry itself but to an 18th-century philosopher. Knowingly or unknowingly, many people have followed the thesis of Scottish skeptic David Hume (1711–1776).

Hume was probably the most prominent philosopher of his generation, and surely the most influential from his time on subsequent generations. He wrote on a wide variety of topics, sometimes very insightfully but sometimes (as with his ethnocentric approach to history) in ways that would not be accepted today.

Hume’s intellectual stature, earned from other works, eventually lent credibility to his 1748 essay on miracles. In this essay, Hume dismisses the credibility of miracle claims, appealing to “natural law” and uniform human experience. Although an appeal to natural law might sound scientific, Hume was not a scientist; in fact, some of his views on causation would make scientific inquiry impossible. Hume’s essay on miracles also contradicts his own approach to discovering knowledge.

Moreover, Hume’s essay has generated serious intellectual counterarguments since the time it was first published. One of these counterarguments was history’s first public use of Bayes’ theorem, today an essential staple in statistics.

Mathematician and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes originated the theorem but died before publishing it. His close friend Richard Price, also a mathematician and minister, published it and then used Bayes’ theorem to refute a probability claim Hume had made in his essay about miracle witnesses.

Hume himself acknowledged …

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Amazon Primes a Sunday Work Dilemma

With two delivery drivers suing over schedules, Sabbatarian Christians find their observance increasingly countercultural in a 24/7 economy.

Mailboxes used to go empty on Sundays.

Not anymore. America’s biggest retailer, Amazon, ships seven days a week, and as the site expands Sunday delivery across the country, more drivers are losing what would have been a steady day off.

For many, the shift just means their break will fall during the week. But for some Christians on the job, the new delivery option conflicts with Sunday church services and their conviction not to work on the Sabbath.

Amazon’s seven-days-a-week schedule has already led to two lawsuits from drivers who were fired for not working on Sundays. Both claimed religious discrimination under Title VII, alleging their employer had not provided “reasonable accommodation” for them to work other days.

In a case in Florida, a Sabbatarian Christian lost his job working for a delivery service contracted by Amazon, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) launched a lawsuit on his behalf. Last week he secured a $50,000 settlement, and his former company, Tampa Bay Delivery Services, will undergo religious sensitivity training.

For a postal worker in Pennsylvania, though, the case is making its way through the Third Circuit Court of Appeals after a district court ruled last year in favor of the US Postal Service.

Gerald Groff is an evangelical Christian who began working as a rural mail carrier in 2012, a part-time role rotating through holiday and weekend routes based on demand.

After the station he was working for began contracting with Amazon for Sunday delivery, he transferred to another rural station. When that one also started Sunday routes, he tried to adjust his schedule and swap days but ended up missing 24 Sundays of work in 2017 and 2018, before being let go in 2019.

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Remembering Abouna Makary, Coptic Priest Loved by Egypt’s Evangelicals

Favorite Orthodox figure on Arabic Christian TV eulogized by fellow evangelist Sameh Maurice after COVID-19 death.

Last month, Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church lost one of its most recognized and charismatic priests. Abouna (“Father”) Makary Younan (1934–2022), a well-known figure on Arabic Christian satellite television, died on January 11 of complications from COVID-19.

Just a few miles from where his funeral services were held at the historic St. Mark’s Cathedral, Abouna Makary’s good friend and Christian television megastar Sameh Maurice convened a heartfelt commemoration at downtown Cairo’s Kasr el-Dobara Church, where he pastors the Arab world’s largest evangelical congregation. Together, these two ceremonies affirmed that the late priest’s legacy of praise, miracles, and ecumenism will endure among Egypt’s Orthodox and Protestant Christians alike.

“Abouna Makary influenced the lives of millions in this generation,” said Maurice. “I know of no other person who touched so many people.”

For nearly two decades, Arabic Christian television introduced both Abouna Makary and “Pastor Sameh” to wider audiences, educating viewers in novel ways about Coptic Orthodoxy and Protestantism. At times both sides have been wary of the medium, especially the Orthodox hierarchy.

Representing the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, in recent years Coptic Orthodox leaders have taken contradictory positions on evangelicals. Some are open to dialogue and friendship, while others lead campaigns not only against popular evangelical leaders like Pastor Sameh but also charismatic priests like Abouna Makary. Stylizing themselves as protectors of indigenous church heritage and of the Copts’ place as the Middle East’s largest Christian sect, they doled …

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Porn Is Plotless

Faithful love requires a storyline, not just a series of sensations.

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

The young man looked down as he talked to me about his ongoing struggles with what he felt to be a compulsion toward pornography.

After this many years in ministry, I’ve had that conversation so many times I can almost script it in advance. But this Christian was able to summarize his situation better than most. “I guess I would say that my problem started with lust,” he said. “And then it was guilt and shame. It’s still all that, but it’s something else too. It’s boredom.”

The same afternoon I talked to a middle-aged Christian, really successful in his career, who said, “I’ve achieved everything I set out to do; and now it just all feels so empty and without meaning. It’s like I’m bored.” I’ve had that conversation too, countless times.

That day, though, I started wondering if, in some way, these conversations were really about the same problem.

I was prompted to ponder this question after reading a jeremiad against “today’s turn towards the pornographic”—not from a likeminded conservative evangelical viewpoint, but from a decidedly secular anticapitalist philosopher.

In his book Capitalism and the Death Drive, Byung-Chul Han clarifies that this “pornographic turn” does not just show up in explicit sexual depictions on the internet, but an even deeper aspect of spiritual malaise.

Han argues that pornography attempts to sever signs from meaning, sensations from communion, the bodily organs from the person. This results in a fragmentation that comes from a kind of hypervisibility and hyperavailability.

Pornography makes use of sexuality, …

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The Witness of the Black Church Rings Through NBA History

Over 75 years of the professional league—and for decades before—Black Christians brought a social conscience to basketball.

In 1949, 42 bronze bells were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean from the Netherlands and installed in the bell tower at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Harlem.

The bells have a remarkable history in their own right. As the first carillon in the world to be played by a Black musician, they have been described by scholars as a “cultural treasure” and “an irreplaceable historical instrument.”

But St. Martin’s didn’t just make history for its tolling church tower. When the bells were installed over 70 years ago, no congregation in the country better represented the melding of basketball and Black culture.

Many of us are familiar with basketball’s Christian origins. The sport, after all, was created at a Christian college (the YMCA’s International Training School) by an ordained Presbyterian minister (James Naismith) for the purpose of cultivating Christian values and spreading the gospel (“winning men to the master through the gym”).

Naismith and the YMCA, however, tell only part of the story. The sport would not have become what we know it to be today had it not been for Black Christian leaders and institutions.

This season, the NBA marks its 75th anniversary. By the time the league was formed, basketball had developed far beyond its Christians roots. And yet, when modern NBA players like Steph Curry splash a three-pointer, or when they champion the cause of racial justice, they bear witness to the past—to the lasting influence of a Christianity nurtured by churches like St. Martin’s that promoted excellence on the court and a social conscience off of it.

Culture making and Black churches

“Here in Harlem the bells are in the center of things, right …

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Interim EC Pres Becomes First African American to Lead a Southern Baptist Entity

Willie McLaurin, former Executive Committee VP, steps in four months after Ronnie Floyd’s resignation.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee has appointed Willie McLaurin to serve as interim president and CEO, marking the first time that any entity of the predominantly white denomination has been headed by a Black person.

McLaurin was named just over two years ago as the committee’s vice president for Great Commission relations and mobilization, a new role meant to focus on spreading the gospel and fostering relations with various demographic groups of Southern Baptists.

Prior to his work for the Executive Committee, McLaurin worked at the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board for 15 years and previously held pastoral roles in churches in that state.

The Executive Committee, headquartered in Nashville, has recently faced turmoil over racism, allegations of mishandling sexual abuse claims, and debates about how much access investigators hired to report on those claims will have to past conversations and other denominational communications.

Ronnie Floyd, the committee’s former president and CEO, resigned in October, citing the committee’s decision to waive attorney-client privilege in the investigation as a reason for his departure. The denomination’s longtime general counsel cut ties with the SBC and at least 10 committee members also resigned, citing similar reasons.

“We hope that he will help us to reset the tone by which the EC serves Southern Baptists,” said California pastor Rolland Slade, the Executive Committee chairman, in a statement about McLaurin in Baptist Press, the SBC’s news service. “Immediately before us is the challenge to regain the sense of trust of Southern Baptists.”

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How White Rule Ended in Missions

Western missionaries championed racial equality abroad while struggling with it in their own ranks.

After the horrors of the Second World War, global attitudes on race began to change as secular and religious leaders called for both civil rights and an end to white rule. While historians usually recount the civil rights movement in the United States with little reference to events in the wider world, religious and secular leaders of the period understood American civil rights as part of part of a larger campaign against global racism.

Attitudes of ethnic superiority were pervasive throughout the Western world, and white, colonial rule was viewed as an expression of the racist worldview. In 1942, a chorus of Protestant leaders began calling for the equality “of other races in our own and other lands.” In 1947, two years after the war ended, the Lutheran theologian Otto Frederick Nolde produced a series of essays arguing for global racial equality, calling for the church to lead the way:

The Christian gospel relates to all men, regardless of race, language or color. … [T]here is no Christian basis to support a fancied intrinsic superiority of any one race. The rights of all peoples of all lands should be recognized and safeguarded. International cooperation is needed to create conditions under which these freedoms may become a reality.

The call for racial equality was part of a worldwide movement that demanded freedom for “all peoples of all lands.” In 1948, the global community adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a watershed event in the worldwide battle against racism. American Protestant missionaries were highly influential in the language of the UDHR and became vocal proponents for religious freedom as well as global human rights. Attitudes were shifting in the Western …

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French’s Two Words for ‘Hope’ Helped Me Endure the Pandemic

In the midst of uncertain times, here’s what I’m learning from “espoir” and “espérance.”

During a recent exchange with a colleague I knew to be quite ambitious, a few of his words stuck with me: “I would rather live a difficult present with my resources than continue to save resources for an uncertain future. Who knows? The way things are going, the world may end tomorrow.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many to think that it is difficult or even impossible to continue to dream and believe in a better future.

Like my colleague, many around us have abandoned projects and are touched by various levels of depression that keep them from looking toward the future. Some have succumbed to suicide when they saw no other way or because they could not imagine living without their close family members who were tragically taken away by the virus. Many hopes have been dashed.

In my country of Benin, many businesses have been forced to cut back on work hours, which has resulted in staff layoffs. Some families have struggled to provide for their basic needs. Certain products that are now difficult to obtain.

And that is not all. The International Labor Organization announced last year that “global unemployment will reach 205 million people by 2022.” How can we not lose hope when faced with these challenges?

Two kinds of hope

Unlike English, which uses the word hope broadly, the French language uses two words that derive from the word espérer (to hope): espoir and espérance. Both can first refer to something hoped for. In this sense, the word espoir usually refers to an uncertain object; that is, someone who hopes for something in this way does not have the certainty that it will happen (“I hope the weather will be nice tomorrow”). On the other hand, espérance describes what, …

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Ukrainian Seminary Leader: Russian Invasion Could Send Baptist Churches Underground

Baptists in western Ukraine prepare to open their homes and churches if brethren have to flee the eastern border.

Baptists in western Ukraine have made plans to shelter fellow believers in the case of a Russian invasion at the eastern border, a Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary graduate who now leads a Baptist seminary in Ukraine told Baptist Press.

“If Russia will invade, they will invade in eastern part and northern part, and a little bit of south,” said Yarsolav “Slavik” Pyzh, president of Ukrainian Baptist Theological Seminary (UBTS) in Lviv who holds a doctorate from Southwestern.

“Churches already agreed,” Pyzh said. “Those that are on the western part of Ukraine … told our brothers and sisters in other parts of Ukraine [that] if something happens we will open our homes and our churches to you.”

Russia persecutes religious minorities, including evangelical Protestants, through restrictions such as the 2016 Yarovaya Law criminalizing evangelism outside church walls. Russia considers any church beyond the government-influenced Russian Orthodox Church to be sectarian or a cult.

Pyzh believes Russian victory in Ukraine would more than likely lead to Ukraine being split into two countries, with western Ukraine remaining independent. Baptist churches that would fall to Russian rule as a consequence would likely transition to spread the gospel underground, Pyzh said, rather than abandon the faith.

“The church will go underground,” he said. “You have to understand that historically we had that experience before under the Soviet Union. So the church did not forget what does it mean to be persecuted, and I think that we will rearrange, reorganize, and still do what we always do, still preach the gospel.”

About 400 of the 1,300 students enrolled at UBTS are …

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Grand Canyon University Sells $1.2 Billion Debt

Arizona school aims to continue expanding campus and increasing in-person enrollments.

Three years and five months after transitioning to nonprofit status, Grand Canyon University (GCU) has successfully sold off $1.2 billion of debt. The milestone marks a major step in a very unusual journey for a Christian school.

One of the nation’s largest Christian universities, GCU was founded as a nonprofit in 1949 but turned into a for-profit entity in 2004 during a period of financial distress. After a decade of increasing its earnings and enrollment, the university returned to nonprofit status. The debt sale, finalized in December, completes GCU’s transition and positions the university for its next phase of growth, GCU president Brian Mueller told CT.

“It was not an easy process, but it ended up being an exhilarating one,” he said. “It’s been described as the largest real-estate-related financing in the state of Arizona history, and so it wasn’t without its complexity; it took some time.”

As a for-profit college, GCU was able to invest $1.6 billion into its academic infrastructure over the last decade, according to Mueller, without significant tuition increases. GCU renovated and expanded its campus, building new classrooms, 25 dorms, a recreation center, and a 7,000-seat arena.

With the money from the junk bond sale, GCU will refinance the remaining debt on a $875 million loan it took out in 2018 as part of the arrangement to separate from Grand Canyon Education (GCE), which remains a for-profit institution. That loan, due in 2025, allowed GCU to buy its assets from GCE.

GCU will also continue freezing on-campus tuition costs and work to grow enrollment, Mueller said. In 2008, the school had around 1,000 on-campus students. Today it has about 23,000—with another 90,000 …

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