To illustrate this, consider the contrast between demon-possession and the “control” of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian. Inspiration, in the biblical authors’ cases, is not symmetrical with demon-possession at all. Demon-possession as recorded in the gospels suppressed the personality of the ‘host’; the Christian experience of the Spirit of God liberates our person to manifest its true character. We are designed to produce “self-control” (Gal 5.23!). The true dance with God brings our inner robustness and personality out to joyous expression. We become more ‘us’ than we could be otherwise.
Geivett and Habermas have collected some of the best available scholars around today to present a case for the actions of God in human history. The book begins with David Hume’s work on miracles along with a response from Antony Flew (the eminent Humean scholar). Then, a barrage of Christian philosophers and theologians tackle the issue of miracles in each chapter. Some of the chapter titles include – “Defining Miracles” (Richard Purtill), “Miracles and the Modern Mind” (Norman L. Geisler), “History and Miracles” (Francis J. Beckwith), “Recognizing a Miracle” (Winfried Corduan), “Science, Miracles, Agency Theory, & the God-of-the-Gaps” (J.P. Moreland), “The Evidential Value of Miracles” (Douglas Geivett), “Miracles in the World Religions” (David K. Clark), “The Incarnation of Jesus Christ” (John S. Feinberg), “The Empty Tomb of Jesus” (William Lane Craig), “The Resurrection Appearances of Jesus” (Gary R. Habermas), and more.
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
The ordinary charge of “rationalization,” like the exposure of errors in reasoning, does not question the claims of reason itself but rather presupposes them. It contrasts the sources of belief in this case with an alternative type of ground that would actually justify them, or demonstrate their truth.
[J]ust as there was no guarantee at the beginning of cosmological and scientific speculation that we humans had the capacity to arrive at objective truth beyond the deliverances of sense-perception — that in pursing it we were doing anything more than spinning collective fantasies — so there can be no decision in advance as to whether we are or are not talking about a subject when we reflect and argue about morality. The answer must come from the results themselves. Only the effort to reason about morality can show us whether it is possible, whether, in thinking about what to do and how to live, we can find methods, reasons, and principles whose validity does not have to be subjectively or relativistically qualified.
We begin from the idea that there is some way the world is, and this, I believe, is an idea to which there is no intelligible alternative and which cannot be subordinated to or derived from anything else… [E]ven a subjectivist cannot escape from or rise above this idea. Even if he wishes to offer an analysis of it in subjective or community-relative terms, his proposal has to be understood as an account of how the world is and therefore as inconsistent with alternative accounts, with which it can be compared for plausibility.
If we are going to teach ‘creation science’ as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
Philosophical naturalism is not merely a gratuitous conclusion that neo-Darwinists draw from their scientific theory; rather, it is the powerful metaphysical basis of the theory itself. How do Darwinists know that natural selection, in combination with random mutations, can produce such apparent wonders of design as the wing, the eye, and the brain? How do they know that preexisting intelligence was not required to produce life in the first place, to guide unicellular life in its progress to more complex forms, and to develop eventually the human mind? In fact Darwinists do not know these things by experiment, or by any other form of scientific investigation. They know them by philosophical presupposition, because their naturalism tells them that nature cannot be affected by anything outside nature. Darwinism is not merely a support for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy.