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Institute of Biblical Studies
Winter 2013
Apologetics
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LECTURE 9
Emerging Church, Darwin, and Homosexuality
I. Scholes Comment on the Emerging Church Movement: Two kinds of emerging believers
A.
Soft: explore new ways of worshiping and bring nonbelievers into the “faith which
was once for all handed down to the saints” (Jude 6).
KIMBALL ON SHARING JESUS’ EXCLUSIVE CLAIMS
We need to be wise missionaries, taking into consideration the culture people of
emerging generations are being raised in and how they think. If we do, more people will listen
to what the Bible teaches about Christianity and other religions and the Spirit of God will be
given much more opportunity to work in people’s lives.
In my conversations with people outside the faith, I have been able to strongly and
clearly explain to them the exclusive claims of Jesus and my belief that salvation comes
through Jesus alone. I don’t have to hide anything or water anything down because my
approach makes all the difference. Because I have established relationships with them,
listened to their spiritual perspectives, and built trust with them, I have been able to share
Jesus’ words that he is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the Father but
through him (John 14:6). I have found that people are actually curious about Jesus statement,
and I’ve had positive dialogue with them about it.
Dan Kimball, They Like Jesus But Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), pp. 166-167.
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Hard: question even core convictions of evangelical Christianity and, where
desirable, reformulate them in light of postmodern philosophy or culture.
MCLAREN ON WHY JESUS IS NOT EXCLUSIVE
[Commenting on John 14:6-7] Jesus isn’t making an abstract statement about the fate
of unbelievers at the final judgment; he is telling his disciples . . . how they will get from here
(with Jesus visibly present)—through a little while (when his body is in the grave)—to there (with
Jesus present in a new way). Thomas’s question seems to be as much an expression of
frustration and confusion as a plea for some specific information. In that light, we can read
Jesus’s response as a repetition and reinforcement of what Jesus has just given them (14:1-4):
reassurance.
He has just said, “Don’t be troubled. Trust God, trust me.” . . .
But what of “No one comes to the Father except through me”? Clearly, taken in context,
these words are not intended as an insult to the followers of Muhammad, the Buddha, Lao-tzu,
Enlightenment rationalism, or anybody or anything else. Rather, the “no one” here refers to
Jesus’s own disciples, who have just been told that he is leaving them for a while . . . .”
Jesus says in verse 9 that the invisible God has been made visible in his life. “If you
want to know what God is like,” Jesus says, “look at me, my life, my way, my deeds, my
character.” And what has that character been? One of exclusion, rejection, constriction, elitism,
favoritism, and condemnation? Of course not! Jesus’s way has been compassion, healing,
acceptance, forgiveness, inclusion, and love from the beginning to end—whether with a visitingby-night Pharisee, a Samaritan woman, a paralyzed man, a woman caught in adultery, or a man
born blind . . . .
“If you have seen me, you have seen the Father,” Jesus says, but our conventional
interpretation of John 14:6 turns this all upside down: “Reinterpret me in light of your old tribal,
chauvinistic, exclusive, elitist views of God and religion. In place of circumcision and dietary
laws to exclude the outsiders, now substitute mental markers or belief markers about me.”
Once this alternative understanding hits you, once you see it, it’s truly heart-breaking that John
14:6 can be used the way it so commonly is.
Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity:Ten Questions That Are
Transforming the Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), pp. 221-223.
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II. Four Views of Origins
A.
B.
Atheistic Evolution (Naturalistic or Unguided Evolution). (Nat'l Academy of Science,
Richard Lewontin [Harvard], Richard Dawkins [Oxford], Stephen Hawking
(Cambridge), etc.)
Theistic Evolution. (American Scientific Affiliation, Kenneth R. Miller [Brown
University], Francis Collins [former Director of Human Genome Project], Joan
Roughgarden [Stanford], Alister McGrath [Oxford], etc.)
COLLINS ADVOCATES THEISTIC EVOLUTION
There are many subtle variants of theistic evolution, but a typical version rests upon the
following premises:
1. The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago.
2. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been
precisely tuned for life.
3. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose,
the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity
and complexity over very long periods of time.
4. Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required.
5. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.
6. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explaination and point to our
spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and
wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.
If one accepts these six premises, then an entirely plausible, intellecturally satisfying, and
logically consistent synthesis emerges: God, who is not limited in space or time, created the
universe and established natural laws that govern it.
This view is entirely compatible with everything that science teaches us about the natural
wolrld. It is also entirely compatible with the great monotheistic religions of the world.
Francis S. Collins, The Language of God, (New York: Free Press, 2006), 200-201.
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C.
Special (6-day) Creationism. Institute for Creation Research, John Morris
[President of ICR], Danny Faulkner [U. of So. Carolina],Kurt Wise [Bryan College],
Duane Gish [ICR], Robert Franks [UC San Diego], Gregory Brewer [So. Illinois U.],
Inis Bardella [U. of Pittsburg], and Ken Ham, President of Answers in Genesis.
D.
Progressive creationism (Intelligent Design movement): Discovery Institute, Phillip
Johnson [U. of California, Berkely], Michael Behe [Lehigh U.], William Dembski
[Southwestern Baptist Seminary], Pattle Pun [Weaton biologist], Walter Bradley
[Baylor U.], Hugh Ross [astronomer, apologist], etc.)
Update: A setback for ID (Intelligent Design).
A.
In 2005, 11 parents of high school students in Dover, Pennsylvania brought suit in
Federal District Court. They charged that the school board was trying to introduce
religion into the school because teachers were being required to read a disclaimer
stating evolution was only a theory and suggesting Intelligent Design and the ID
textbook, Of Pandas and People as an alternative to evolution.
B.
There was a six-week trial in which Michael Behe, Scott Minnich (microbiologist at
U. of Idaho) and Steve Fuller (U. of Warwick, U.K) testified on behaf of Intelligent
Design.
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Judge John Jones (appointed by George W. Bush in 2002) ruled that: a) Intelligent
Design is not science, b) ID is just thinly-veiled creationism, c) evolution is not
antithetical to religion, d) the goal of the ID movement is to smuggle religion into
schools and e) it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution.
JUDGE JONES RULES THAT ID IS NOT SCIENCE
After a searching review of the record and applicable case law, we find that while
intelligent design arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position,
intelligent design is not science. We find that intelligent design fails on three different levels,
any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that intelligent design is science.
They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting
supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the
same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s; and
(3) ID’s negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. It is
additionally important to note that intelligent design has failed to gain acceptance in the
scientific community, it has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the
subject of testing and research. Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of
the 16th and 17th centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to
explain natural phenomena.
Judge John E. Jones III, from transcript of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District,
12/20/05 [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/
Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District/4:Whether_ID_Is_Science]
IV.
Persuasion: The Issue Should Be Decided on Scientific Evidence
A.
Don't hinder the Gospel or get side-tracked.
B.
The real issue in evangelism is that God created, not how.
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V. We Are Made Male and Female
Heterosexuality, not homosexuality, is God's plan for the human race. Gen. 1:26-28; Gen. 19
(Sodomite men); Liv. 18:22; 10:13; Rom. 1:21-32; 1 Cor. 6:9-11; 1 Tim. 1:9-11.
1.
There is no conclusive evidence that anyone is “born homosexual.” Even the most
optimistic homosexual researchers admit that genetic determination has not been
proven.
GAY RESEARCHER LEVAY ADMITS ENVIRONMENT AFFECTS HOMOSEXUALITY
When a gay man, for example, says he was born gay, he generally means that he felt
different from other boys at the earliest age he can remember. Sometimes the difference
involved sexual feelings, but more commonly it involved some kind of gender-nonconformist or
'sex-atypical' traits--disliking rough-and-tumble play, for example--that were not explicitly sexual.
These differences, which have been verified in a number of ways, suggest that sexual
orientation is influenced by factors operating very early in life, but these factors could still
consist of environmental forces such as parental treatment in the early postnatal period”
Simon LeVay, Queer Science, MIT Press, 1996, p. 6.
3. What about the “Twin Study?”
DID STUDY PROVE HOMOSEXUALITY IS ENTIRELY GENETIC?
Byne, a psychiatrist with a doctorate in biology, and Parsons (1993) looked carefully at other
biochemical theories and found that the evidence for a causative connection just is not there.
They also noted the actual data in the most widely quoted study, Bailey and Pillard's (1991)
investigation of homosexuality in twins. In spite of what Bailey and Pillard claimed and the
newspapers reported, if this study proves anything, it is that human homosexuality is not
genetically predetermined. These are the critical data: Even identical twins (which means those
with identical heredity) correlated between themselves only 52 percent for homosexuality--so
other factors must affect matters; but even more critically, fraternal twins were concordant for
homosexuality twice as often as were non-twin biological brothers (22 percent vs. 9 percent).
From the genetic standpoint, those two figures should have been the same, since non-twin
related siblings and fraternal twins form one genetic group. In other words, if the data mean
anything, then twinship may be a factor, but genes cannot be.
Johanna Krout Tabin, Ph.D., “Clinically Based Thoughts About
The Development Of Homosexuality” Source: Collected Papers from the NARTH Annual
Conference, Saturday, 29 July 1995.
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4. Did Dean Hamer “discover the gay gene?” (As he seems to be claiming in the Bill Maher
movie, “Religulous.”) No! In his book, The Science of Desire, Hamer explicitly says he did
not! Further, he estimates that if there is such a gene, it only “plays some role” in between
5% and 30% of all gay men.
HAMER DID NOT DISCOVER THE “GAY GENE”
The most important limitation of our research was that we didn’t isolate a “gay gene”;
we only detected its presence through linkage. We narrowed the search to the neighborhood,
the X chromosome—and even the block, Xq28—but we didn’t find the house . . . .
If much of homosexuality is caused by environmental factors, or by a large number of
interacting genes, Xq28 could account for as little as a few percent of the variation in male
sexual orientation. The median range, taken from our linkage data and from the available twin
and family studies, suggest that Xq28 plays some role in about 5 to 30 percent of gay men.
Dean Hamer & Peter Copeland, The Science of Desire: The Search for the Gay Gene and
the Biology of Behavior(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 147, 145-6.
5. In 1999, several researchers tried to replicate Hamer’s findings and found no evidence of
the supposed linkage.
RESEARCHERS FIND NO EVIDENCE OF GENETIC LINKAGE
Several lines of evidence have implicated genetic factors in homosexuality. The most
compelling observation has been the report of genetic linkage of male homosexuality to
microsatellite markers on the X chromosome. This observation warranted further study and
confirmation. Sharing of alleles at position Xq28 was studied in 52 gay male sibling pairs from
Canadian families. Four markers at Xq28 were analyzed (DXS1113, BGN, Factor 8, and
DXS1108). Allele and haplotype sharing for these markers was not increased over expectation.
These results do not support an X-linked gene underlying male homosexuality.
G. Rice, C. Anderson, N. Risch & G. Ebers, “Male Homosexuality: Absence of Linkage to
Microsatellite Markers at Xq28” Science (23 April 1999, Vol. 284), p. 665.
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6. Did UCLA prove that sexual identity is genetic?
PRINCETON PROFESSOR ASSESSES THE UCLA STUDY
The research is a decent piece of basic science and confirms what geneticists have long known
must be the case: That the hormonal milieu that causes sexual differentiation between males and
females is itself determined by genes, in mice as in men. This comes as no surprise.
But this research says absolutely nothing about homosexuality or transsexualism and any who
claim it does are either ill-informed about genetics, or if not, are deliberately abusing their
scientific knowledge and or credentials in the service of politics – in precisely the same way that
Soviet-era geneticists such as Lysenko did – either in the naïve hope that distortion of the truth
can produce a better society or out of fear for their career prospects. In either case they should
be roundly rebuked for doing so.
Dr. Jeffrey Satinover. E-mail correspondence with Robert Knight, 21 October 2003.
7. There is correlation (homosexuality tends to run in families) but no evidence of genetic
determinism.
FORMER HEAD OF HUMAN GENOME PROJECT:
“SEXUAL ORIENTATION IS NOT HARDWIRED”
An area of particularly strong public interest is the genetic basis of homosexuality.
Evidence from twin studies does in fact support the conclusion that heritable factors play a role
in male homosexuality. However, the likelihood that the identical twin of a homosexual male
will also be gay is about 20% (compared with 2-4 percent of males in the general population),
indicating that sexual orientation is genetically influenced but not hardwired by DNA, and that
whatever genes are involved represent predispositions, not predeterminations.
Francis S. Collins, The Language of God
(New York: Free Press, 2006), p.260
8. Although many researchers are looking for such evidence, all current studies are highly
tentative and open to various interpretations.
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9. The American Pyschological Association reverses its view on whether sexual orientation is
genetically determined
In 1998, the APA stated, “There is considerable recent evidence to suggest that biology,
including genetic or inborn hormonal factors, play a significant role in a person's sexuality."
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=528376
states:
However in a current APA published booklet and on the APA official website, it now
“There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a
heterosexual, bisexual, gay, or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the
possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual
orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation
is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play
complex roles.”
http://www.apa.org/topics/sorientation.html#whatcauses
10. Many "homosexuals" have sex with both men and women and many do change through
conversion and discipleship (and even psycho-therapy).
This is widely accepted among psychological professionals, despite gay activists attempts to
suppress information through propaganda and even threats.
PSYCHOLOGY TODAY EDITOR THREATENED BY GAY ACTIVISTS
I bring these matters to your attention because of a threatening phone call I received a few
weeks ago from a fellow psychologist. On page 78 of our last issue, PT ran a small ad for a
book called A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality by Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D., and his
wife Linda. Nicolosi is a psychologist who specializes in trying to help unhappy gays become
straight. Apparently feeling that this rather modest contribution to the literature on
homosexuality wasn't getting enough attention, the psychologist, who identified herself as a
lesbian activist, called me at home on a Saturday to tell me that PT should not have run such a
heinous ad, that she was speaking for "thousands" of gays who were going to boycott PT, "and
worse," that Dr. Nicolosi was a "bigot," that no gay person had ever successfully become
straight, that homosexuality was entirely determined by genes, and that sexual conversion
therapy had been condemned by the American Psychological Association. I told her that the
editorial department at PT has no connection whatsoever with the advertising department, but
she was unimpressed. She subsequently posted messages on the Internet urging people to
harass me at home (no one else ever did) and to send me complaint letters.
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PSYCHOLOGY TODAY EDITOR THREATENED (CONTINUED)
In all, I received about 120 letters, many of which exemplified a bad game of Telephone: Some
people complained about an anti-gay "article" PT had published; others referred to an anti-gay
book I had published and people who weren't subscribers said they were dropping their
subscriptions. Several writers suggested I was a "Nazi" and a "bigot," and one compared me
with the Taliban.
A surprising number of letters asserted that gays have a right to be rude or abusive because
they themselves have been abused. Most echoed the same points that my caller had made But
my caller was way off base on key points. The APA has never condemned sexual conversion
therapy but has merely issued cautionary statements, one of which reminds psychologists of
their obligation to "respect the rights of others to hold values, attitudes and opinions that differ
from [their] own"-an obligation from which my caller clearly feels exempt. Although
homosexuality was removed from the DSM-the diagnostic manual used by therapists-as a
mental disorder in 1973, all editions of the DSM have always listed a disorder characterized by
"distress" over one's sexual orientation (DSM section 302.9). Both gays and straights have a
right to seek treatment when they're unhappy with their sexual orientation, and some choose to
try to change that orientation. It would be absurd to assert that only heterosexuals should have
that right.
Can gays change? Some people who wrote to me insisted that "orientation" is immutable, but
behavior is certainly not, and it's common for people to ask therapists to help them suppress a
wide variety of tendencies with possible genetic bases: compulsive shopping and gambling,
drinking, drug use, aggressiveness, urges to have too much sex or sex with children and so on.
A 2002 research review by Warren Throckmorton, Ph.D., published in an APA journal, suggests
that sexual conversion therapy is at least sometimes successful. From this and other sources
I've checked, I'd guess that such therapy is probably successful about a third of the time and
that in perhaps another third of the cases, clients are unhappy or even angry about their failure
to change. These figures might sound discouraging, but there are certainly many examples of
clinical problems that resist change (e.g., agoraphobia and autism) or that produce angry
outcomes after therapy (e.g., couples counseling or treatment for sexual abuse). Of greater
importance is a new study by Robert Spitzer, M.D., of Columbia University, the man who
headed the committee responsible for removing "homosexuality" from the DSM in 1973. After
surveying 200 people who had remained "ex-gay" for at least five years-and even though he has
been under tremendous pressure by gay activists to repudiate his findings-Spitzer has
concluded that sexual conversion therapy can produce significant, positive and lasting
changes.
“Am I Anti-Gay? You Be The Judge.” A letter from Editor-In-Chief,
Robert Epstein Psychology Today Jan/Feb 2003
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11. How should we respond if there is new evidence that seems to show a genetic basis for
homosexuality?
12. How should we respond to individuals caught in homosexuality? Three possible stances:
a.
Condemnation, even possibly persecution (homophobia).
b.
Justification; excuse the behavior as a legitimate "alternate lifestyle."
c.
Jesus has a third alternative: We have no historical record of an encounter
between Jesus and a practicing homosexual. But it is reasonable to assume His
response would have been similar to His attitude toward the woman caught in
adultery: "Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more!" (John 8:10-11)
12. Homosexuals are people in God’s image: we must treat them with compassion.
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