From 2020: Bob Enyart continues to air audio from last week from Greg Koulk, apologist president of Stand to Reason, who tragically denies, and thus defends, his moral relativism. Back in 2007 (see kgov.com/koukl) Greg encouraged Christians to support Republican candidates who are mass-murderers (by their open support for abortion). And still in 2020, he openly exhibits his own moral relativism as in his claim, though with clarification, that "some same sex couples are fabulous." And by that, he means, fabulous parents who we can support even in adopting children. Bob let Greg know that we planned to air and discuss his audio and Koukl did reply, but with the same defense he made years ago. "We report. You decide?" No. Actually, God decides.
* BEL Resources on Moral Relativism:
- 2020 Apologist Koukl Still Tragically Denies His Moral Relativism
- 2020 Koukl BELs 7/21 (today's program) 7/29 8/3
- 2010 Personhood, Creation, the Law, and Moral Relativism
- Suggest other BEL resources to us at Bob@kgov.com. Thanks!
- 2007 Bob Debates Moral Relativist Greg Koukl
- 2007 Focus on the Strategy 2 video...
Today's Resource: Nicer Than God
Enjoy this fast-paced critique of religion where Bob Enyart presents questions such as: When should a Christian lie? Should he ever mock? How about name-calling? Does sarcasm belong in the Christian’s repertoire? How about ridicule? Learn why nice is not in the Bible and how to identify a Nicer-Than-God Christian. If Christians are not supposed to judge, then why does Jesus command us to judge rightly? And if only God will judge, then why does Paul say that we believers will judge the angels, and judge the world? If Jesus logged onto a website forum under a pseudonym, would we recognize Him, or condemn Him? This album communicates well Bob Enyart’s unique style. But, warning, warning, warning, Will Robertson, it is not for the faint of heart.
* Separately, Koukl says Science Cannot be Certain of Anything: As a preview to our 2015 rsr.org/forensics program on historical science, in 2013 we published a brief KGOV article, Can Science Prove Anything Absolutely? As quoted there, Greg Koukl had written that science "cannot be certain about anything in an absolute sense. ...its method never allows certainty" and then apparently contradictorily, Greg stated, "science is not the only means of giving us true information..." Consider this excerpt:
...it is said that science cannot “prove” anything. We allege that in this vein, creationists have surrendered far too much to atheistic relativists. As a corollary, to this, we hear that science cannot prove anything but it can only disprove things.
Sources: 1. A theory can "never [be] proven correct" on PBS.org; "can never be shown to be correct" at gsu.edu; 2. UCMP at the Berkeley department of paleontology. 3. A popular creationist homeschool textbook says, "Science cannot prove anything. The best science can say is that all known data support a given statement. …there is no way that science can prove anything." Wile & Durnell, Exploring Creation with Biology, 2nd Edition, 2005, p. 33; Science, "cannot be certain about anything in an absolute sense. ...its method never allows certainty" and then perhaps contradictorily, "science is not the only means of giving us true information..." Greg Koukl, Stand to Reason, 2013; "all scientific knowledge is tentative… nothing is final. There is no such thing as final proven knowledge in science" at psychologytoday.com.
Scientific Absolutes: The claim that science cannot absolutely prove anything is related to the more extreme and easily falsified atheist claim that there is no truth. Yes, we Christians take the Scriptures as our highest authority. But millions of people lived prior to Moses and Job, and it is not as though they had no ability to know truth. (They could even know God, as a number of them did, and God is truth.) There are various ways of obtaining or possessing apodictic, or absolute, knowledge. Consider the common claim, as in this quote from Berkeley, that "a hypothesis cannot ever be proven, only disproven." Has that been proven? To disprove a hypothesis is to prove its negation. (A hypothesis: The reason that even very large array telescopes will never find the center of the universe is because the universe has no center. Falsification: A theoretical falsification is the growing redshift data that increasingly indicates that the universe does have a center. Disproving that hypothesis proves another: The universe has a center.)
Absolutes vs. Omniscience: Knowing some things absolutely does not equate to knowing everything. Could it be that the especially extreme claim that science "cannot prove anything" is really just unintentional hyperbole? Those making such claims seem to confuse something with everything, and therefore confuse our ability to know some things absolutely with our inability to know everything. Some claim that the best that scientific investigation can do is to bring you closer to the truth (i.e., closer to understanding reality). However, if science doesn't know absolutely that:
- light travels faster than sound, nor that
- the solar surface is hotter than the lunar, nor that
- electromagnetic opposites attract,
if it were that much in the dark, then science could not bring anyone "closer" to anything. However, science does know these things absolutely. When some argue that science cannot tell us anything, it seems that what they really mean is that science cannot make us omniscient. If that's what they mean, though, then that is what they should say; for the overstatement we hear only serves to promote the relativism of materialism. Lacking omniscience does not prove the lack of all knowledge. RSR hopes that creationists will realize that they have been unnecessarily agreeing with atheists by making such an extreme claim.Real Science Radio has other disagreements with creationists on such assumptions, but for now we'll add one last observation, and then let these suffice as our first shot across the bow. :) We see the matter of historical vs. observational science as mostly a manufactured issue. We do not only make careful observations and do repeated experiments in the laboratory. Human beings live that same way. We cook, work, and read while making careful observations and performing inherent repeated experiments. In a dream, every time we read a book the words can change; in the waking world, we know that the words on our printed pages do not rearrange themselves into varying messages. That alone is a form of absolute scientific knowledge. If we didn't know that, we couldn't trust the words we read in a book, whether a dictionary or the Bible. Claiming that science can tell us nothing absolute is tantamount to saying that we can have no trust in our minds, nor our senses, and if this were true, of course we would have no ability to trust any input, whether from the Bible, or, like ourselves and the millions who lived prior to the Scriptures, from any source whatsoever. We assert that the claims of the impossibility of certain scientific knowledge are concessions to the relativism of the materialist.