Logic

Wesley So, the current US Chess Champion (in 2017, 2020, and 2021), shares how he came to Christ:

On the small planet where elite chess players dwell, very few people worship Jesus Christ. If anyone discovers that you’re one of those “superstitious,” “narrow-minded idiots,” you’re likely to see nasty comments accumulate on your Facebook fan page. They wonder how I, the world’s second-ranked chess player, can be so “weak-minded.”

Wesley grew up in the Philippines and as a child was told that if he was good, God would bless him. But this confused him, because it seemed like the bad people received more than the good people. He knew of many famous crooks who went to church and they were pretty rich. So, Wesley decided to play it safe. He would recite the right words in church, but he never connected to God in a meaningful way.

He played chess since age six or seven and as he grew up, he kept on winning. But he could never afford to hire a coach or get serious chess training. When he was 18, he got an offer to play on the chess team of a small American university. So, he left home and moved to America.

Then I met the people who would become my foster family. They were Christians, and Lotis, my foster mother, could sense my unhappiness. She asked me what I wanted to do in life, and I replied that I loved playing chess but didn’t think I was talented enough to translate that into a full-time career. Lotis told me to focus on chess alone for the next two years—the family would support me any way it could.

His foster parents were mature Christians and insisted that living as a member of the family meant that he would need to faithfully accompany them to church. They taught him that the Bible was the final authority, deeper and wiser than the internet and more truthful than any of his friends.

Before long, I was practicing my faith in a more intense way. My new family calls Christianity the “thinking man’s religion.” They encouraged me to ask questions, search for answers, and really wrestle with what I discovered. I knew I wanted the kind of simple, contented, God-fearing life they enjoyed.

People in the chess world sometimes want to know whether I think God makes me win matches. Yes. And sometimes he makes me lose them too. He is the God of chess and, more importantly, the God of everything. Win or lose, I give him the glory. Will I rise to become the world champion one day? Only God knows for sure. In the meantime, I know that he is a generous and loving Father, always showering me with more blessings than I could possibly deserve.

In his book, The Sentient Machine, Amir Husain writes:

Today I find myself drawn to the important observation that the universe around us is clearly a consequence of computation. A seed, for example, encodes the information necessary to produce a tree. With DNA as the software and cells and proteins as the hardware, the biological process is a computational one. We find these types of algorithmic outcomes everywhere we look in the universe.

Patterns like the Fibonacci sequence, for example, unlock designs across our cosmos. Everything from flower petals to the curving shells of a mollusk, to spiral galaxies, to hurricanes, adheres to this mathematical formula. Is this by chance?

There seems to be a mathematical seed at the heart of the cosmos that through the power of computation, has been magnified into the universe as we know it, just as a tree is a magnified seed.

At some point in my early adolescence, I tried to imagine a future where all of science fused together. All the deductions completed and all the building blocks of science synthesized into a great pyramid of knowledge. At the very top of this pyramid however, I realized that I was still missing a block that tied it all together. That block is the ultimate question, “What is this all for?’”

He then concludes with a chilling realization, that even with all of our advancements, “we still don’t know the purpose for our existence."

Possible Preaching Angle:

As a Christian, we would argue, that just as a computer program begins in the mind of a computer scientist, the mathematical patterns that govern our universe are testimony to a Programmer. And just as a computer program must run on hardware, that is itself manufactured by an intelligent being, the universe itself bears witness to a supernatural Creator.

When the lines and wait times at the local drive-through coronavirus vaccine clinic became unbearable, local officials sought out the experts. Mount Pleasant Mayor Will Haynie said, "When I heard about it, I called Jerry and asked if he would come help us out.” The man in question was Jerry Walkowiak, manager of the local Chick-Fil-A restaurant, a chain known for serving large numbers of drive-through orders.

Mayor Haynie explained how things got sorted out. "After he looked it over, he said, 'There's your problem right there. It's backed up because you have one person checking people in.' Then he showed us how to do it right." Walkowiak mobilized a bunch of volunteers from the local Rotary Club, and before long, the hour-long wait had been trimmed to a more manageable fifteen minutes.

Walkowiak is only the latest in a long trend of professionals from adjacent fields being asked to help facilitate large-scale vaccination efforts. The Associated Press reported that health officials in Massachusetts have tapped Dave McGillivray, director of the Boston Marathon, to run mass vaccinations at Gillette Stadium and Fenway Park.

Possible Preaching Angle:

When God gives you a talent, you never know how that talent might be used to bless the community around you. Don’t look down on your abilities just because they’re not explicitly meant for use inside the church; rather, look for every opportunity to bless your community as you do your work as unto the Lord.

What happens when a CSI-style forensic detective goes to Calvary to investigate what transpired after Jesus' crucifixion? J. Warner Wallace is a forensic detective specializing in cold-case investigations. As an atheist Wallace became intrigued with the Gospels and their account of Jesus' resurrection because “the most important question I could ask about Christianity just so happened to fall within my area of expertise. Did Jesus really rise from the dead?” It would prove to be the ultimate cold-case forensic investigation because eyewitnesses and material evidence that could be used to prove or disprove what happened have been gone for nearly 2000 years. Wallace came away utterly convinced that it was true.

As an atheist, Wallace had always assumed that the resurrection was a lie, believing that the twelve apostles “concocted, executed, and maintained the most elaborate and influential conspiracy of all time.” When Wallace looked at the evidence and as an “unbeliever: he found four minimal facts to be substantiated “by both friends and foes” of Christianity:

1. Jesus died on the cross and was buried.

2. Jesus’ tomb was empty and no one ever produced his body.

3. Jesus’ disciples believed that they saw Jesus resurrected from the dead.

4. Jesus’ disciples were transformed following their alleged resurrection observations.

Wallace tells how he then used the kind of abductive reasoning he would use at a crime scene “inferring the most reasonable explanation” and came up with several hypotheses:

One: The disciples were mistaken about Jesus’s death. Jesus survived his crucifixion and appeared to disciples after he recovered. This theory fails to explain what the disciples saw when they brought Jesus down from the cross. Didn’t they check if he was breathing, if his body was cold, or if rigor mortis had set in? Is it reasonable to believe they would have not noticed any of these conditions common to dead bodies?

Two: The disciples stole the body and fabricated the story of the resurrection. While this explanation accounts for the empty tomb, it fails to account for the transformed lives of the apostles. The apostles, who had been cowards, were now suddenly as bold as a battleship because of the lies they themselves had concocted.

Three: The disciples were delusional. This fails to account for the empty tomb. More importantly, Wallace argues that he has never encountered large groups having identical hallucinations.

Four: An imposter tricked the disciples, convincing them that Jesus was alive. This theory fails to account for the empty tomb and requires an impersonator. The disciples were highly skeptical and the impersonator would have had to be adept at copying Jesus’ mannerisms. Above all, he would have needed to possess miraculous powers since the disciples’ report Jesus working miracles after the resurrection.

Five: The resurrection is a wildly exaggerated legend that grew exponentially over time. This theory clashes with the record of witnesses making claims about the resurrection from the earliest days of the Christian movement.

Wallace concludes: “The resurrection is reasonable. The answers are available; you don’t have to turn off your brain to be a believer.” Wallace joins a long line of intellectuals who are part of the “resurrection genre” of writers--sceptics who started out to disprove the resurrection and ended up believing that it is true.

Reflecting upon Paul’s words from 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, author/pastor Matthew McCullough asks, “How do we see what is invisible more clearly than what’s so painfully visible?” As an answer, he offers the following:

Paul’s argument reminds me of a negative-space portrait, where what is there is meant to draw attention to what is not there. What is visible helps you see what is invisible. Think of the FedEx logo, where the space between the E and X creates an arrow pointing forward. Or think of the NBC logo, where the pads of color outline the body of the famous peacock. It’s like Paul is saying, you want to see what is not visible? Look at what is visible. Pay attention to where it stops short, runs out, dries up. Trace the limits of what you can see, the transient things always passing away, and there you will start to see the shape of the invisible glory still to come.

In light of the Super Bowl game, there was a discussion about one crucial word in the game of football that keeps enduring—Hut! An article in The New York Times pondered why this word keeps hanging around:

It is easily the most audible word in any football game, a throaty grunt that may be the sport's most distinguishing sound. Hut!

It starts almost every play, and often one is not enough. And in an increasingly complex game whose signal-calling has evolved into a cacophony of furtive code words—"Black Dirt!" "Big Belly!" "X Wiggle!"—hut, hut, hut endures as the signal to move. But why?

Most football players have no idea why. A pro ball center said, "I guess because it's better than yelling, 'Now,' or 'Go.' Some people have used 'Go' and that's awful. That doesn't sound like football." A former quarterback reckons he shouted "hut" more than 10,000 times during games and practices. "I've been hutting my way through football for 55 years—but I have no clue why."

The article conjectures that "Hut" may come from the military backgrounds of many early pro football players. But that's just a guess.

Possible Preaching Angles: Bible; Doctrine; Doubts; Questions; Interpretation—This is a great way to set up a sermon on any topic of what Christians believe or what the Bible teaches. Perhaps people have been told what to believe without the why or the rationale behind that belief or doctrine.

The popular novelist Andrew Klavan was raised in a non-practicing Jewish home. For about the first 45 years of his life, he lived as a "philosophical agnostic and a practical atheist." Klavan explains some of the steps along his journey that eventually led him to faith in Christ:

Jesus never appeared to me while I lay drunk in the gutter. And yet, looking back on my life, I see that Christ was beckoning to me at every turn. When I was a child, he was there in the kindness of a Christian babysitter and the magic of a Christmas Eve spent at her house. When I was a troubled young man contemplating suicide, he was in the voice of a Christian baseball player who gave a radio interview that inspired me to go on. And always, he was in the day-to-day miracle of my marriage, a lifelong romance that taught me the reality of love and slowly led me to contemplate the greater love that was its source and inspiration.

But perhaps most important for a novelist who insisted that ideas should make sense, Christ came to me in stories. Slowly, I came to understand that his life, words, sacrifice, and resurrection formed the hidden logic behind every novel, movie, or play that touched my deepest mind.

I was reading a story when that logic finally kicked in. I was in my forties, lying in bed with one of Patrick O'Brian's great seafaring adventure novels. One of the characters, whom I admired, said a prayer before going to sleep, and I thought to myself, Well, if he can pray, so can I. I laid the book aside and whispered a three-word prayer in gratitude for the contentment I'd found, and for the work and people I loved: "Thank you, God."

It was a small and even prideful prayer: a self-impressed intellectual's hesitant experiment with faith. God's response was an act of extravagant grace. I woke the next morning and everything had changed. There was a sudden clarity and brightness to familiar faces and objects; they were alive with meaning and with my own delight in them. I called this experience "the joy of my joy," and it came to me again whenever I prayed. Naturally I began to pray every day.

This would lead to a full acceptance of Christ as Lord. Later, Klavan was baptized and wrote a book about his spiritual journey titled The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.

Kurt Gödel was a history-making logician and mathematician who died in 1978. In his later years, while working at the renowned Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he became convinced that someone was out to poison him. He relied entirely on his beloved wife, Adele, to cook his meals and to be his taste tester whenever they were away from home.

In 1977 Adele was hospitalized and could no longer help her eccentric husband. His friends tried everything to get him to eat, but he refused. Eventually the masterful logician succumbed—at the end, weighing just sixty-five pounds. According to the official death certificate, he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance." In plain language, he starved himself to death.

Possible Preaching Angles: We all have "faith" in something. But faith is only as good as the object we place it in. Gödel was obviously a brilliant person, but he believed so strongly that people were out to poison him that it overwhelmed even his will to survive.

Individuals with standing in a particular professional field sometimes feel free, or even obligated, to cloak themselves in the authority of their area of expertise and make grandiose statements such as this by a professor of biological sciences:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear …. There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That's the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.

Logically viewed, this statement is simply laughable. Nowhere within the published, peer-reviewed literature of biology—even evolutionary biology—do any of the statement of which the professor is "absolutely certain" appear as valid conclusions of sound research. One trembles to think that an expert in the field would not know this or else would feel free to disregard it. Biology as a field of research and knowledge is not even about such issues. It simply does not deal with them. They do not fall within the provinces of responsibilities. Yet it is very common to hear such declamations about the state of the universe offered up in lectures and writings by specialists in certain areas who have a missionary zeal for their personal causes.