You may have heard that the materialist idea of everything arising from time plus chance is about as likely as a hurricane sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747. I like the analogies Hugh Ross provides in The Creator and the Cosmos even better.

John Erickson doesn’t write parables, but some of his stories about the cowboy life he once lived would work well in church. The Bible refers to us as sheep, sometimes without a shepherd, but we also act like cattle and anger the Owner of the ranch. In 1982, Erickson, the author of the popular Hank the Cowdog series of books, published a bunch of these stories in The Devil in Texas and Other Cowboy Tales.

For more than 30 years I’ve read about and reported on the relation of worldviews to questions of international relief and development. American newspapers, hard hit by their loss of advertising to the internet, almost never do what The Milwaukee Journal did in the 1980s. It sent two reporters to Asia and Latin America to investigate problems of poverty. Working independently, each reporter came up with evidence pointing to five similar conclusions—and since we don’t see that kind of enterprise these days, I’ll report their findings.

Joshua Harris’ divorce from both his wife and Christianity stunned many evangelicals. Here are analyses written by WORLD Magazine columnist Janie B. Cheaney and WORLD News Group board member Albert Mohler, republished here with their permission. —Marvin Olasky

Joshua Harris and the perils of idolatry

By Janie B. Cheaney

Just about every college student now learns that natural science is the supreme intellectual authority, while theology depends on blind faith, emotion, and cultural upbringing. In Scientism and Secularism, philosophy professor J.P. Moreland points out that such scientism—making science supreme—is not “a friend of science but rather its enemy.” Humble science tells us what is testable, but believers in scientism pretend to know about past and present what they can’t possibly know.

John Erickson doesn’t write parables, but some of his stories about the cowboy life he once lived would work well in church. The Bible refers to us as sheep, sometimes without a shepherd, but we also act like cattle and anger the Owner of the ranch.

The one sermon many secular students ever read or hear about is “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” preached by Jonathan Edwards. It’s a good and true sermon, but it boxes in Edwards as an aficionado of anger—and he was much more than that. Owen Strachan and Douglas A. Sweeney’s The Essential Jonathan Edwards is an excellent introduction to the great 18th century theologian who is heavy sledding for modern readers.