Thursday, April 4, 2013

Eighteenth Link Year Recap 4/2-4/4

Hey everyone, hope you guys had as great of an Easter Break as I did! It would be hard for that to be true for mine was fantastic, but I suppose you can try. Well this week we got the huge privilege of having Sean McDowell come speak to us. If you didn't know Sean is the son of the famous Christian Apologetics/Ethics/Everything Else writer Josh McDowell. I know, it is pretty amazing that we got the chance to hear from Sean! He was really pretty great and definitely ranks near the top of speakers we have had. Well onto some of the things he talked about.

1) For his first 45 minute session on Tuesday he decided to play Devils Advocate and be an Atheist. He basically just sat up there and let everyone in the class throw some questions at him and try to debate against the Atheist worldview. It should't come as too much of a surprise when I tell you that Sean completely destroyed everyone who tried to bring questions against Atheism. He was extremely well versed in what Atheist believe and has read many of the famous atheist writers like Dawkins, Hawkings, Harris..etc. Honestly I greatly enjoyed just sitting in my seat listening to all the questions and seeing how Sean went about answering them. If I'm going to be completely honest with you I was full on rooting for Sean. Can't really pin down why, but I just was.

2) Something that became obvious very quickly during the role playing was how hostile all us students were being toward Sean. It really hit home the point about how most Atheist see Christians as just hating and hostile people. For me it comes down to the key point of winning the person, not the argument. I think that's a very important thing to remember. Because they aren't going to care about what you have to say unless they know that you actually care about them.

3) Objective and Subjective truth. A pretty fun subject for me and something that I learned in Philosophy class last year but that I still greatly enjoyed hearing Sean reiterate. It's amazing how often people get those two things mixed up and always say that religion is Subjective. 

4) He gave us a really good quote, "You know what someone believes about morality not by what they say or what they do, but how they want to be treated.". I think this really hits home on the whole, "What's right for you is right for you and what's wrong for you is wrong for you", basically the whole Relativism thing going on in Postmodernism. 

5) He mentioned the book Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe. This is also a book that was mentioned in Philosophy class last year and we discussed all the things with Irreducible Complexity. This is a subject that really fascinates me. He gives the whole example of a mousetrap and how if even on single part was not there the whole trap would not work. That being said if the mousetrap went through an evolutionary process it would not work. There is much more to this theory which is why I plan on eventually reading this book. To learn more about it and such.

So that's it folks, it was a great week as I said before. It was also really cool to go eat lunch with the Donyes and McDowell's (Not Josh McDowell, but Sean McDowell, his wife, and three kids). Definitely one of the better parts of my week. Also Sean is a baller, got a chance to play some bball with him while he was here. Pretty sweet stuff. Anyway that about wraps it up, enjoy the weekend and find some obscure holiday to celebrate. 



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