Thank you ABC

I nearly fell out of my chair. My lovely bride frequently tunes in to Good Morning America to catch the weather as she gets ready for work. Yesterday morning, the guests were Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, talking about their book "The Jesus Chronicles, John's Story: The Last Eyewitness."

I’m used to ABC putting a very leftward spin on their reporting, so I was expecting something confrontational, or at best theologically squishy. I was amazed at what I saw, which you can watch here.

LaHaye and Jenkins did a wonderful job discussing miracles, the importance of Christ’s deity, and our need for atonement. I was expecting ABC reporter Chris Cuomo to be rude to LaHaye and Jenkins, but he was polite, respectful and let them answer his questions.

I’ve actually never read LaHaye and Jenkins’ more famous work, The Left Behind Series. I do know that many Christians believe that their eschatology is problematic. However, I am thrilled that LaHaye and Jenkins said what they said, and that ABC let them.

I went here to send a note of thanks. I would encourage you to do the same.

Check out the story here.

Gotcha

Last year about this time, a federal judge ruled that the Dover, PA school board could not mandate that a statement about intelligent design be read in their school’s biology classes. He not only ruled that the decision was unconstitutional, he also went on at length about how terrible and unscientific intelligent design is.

He was lauded in the media for how deep and thoughtful his ruling was.

But a couple days ago, the Discovery Institute released this report, which shows without a doubt that Judge Jones plagiarized his decision from documents given him by the ACLU. He even included mistakes made by the ACLU documents.

Does this place the ruling in jeopardy? Not to my knowledge. But it is highly ironic. Intelligent Design is based on specified complexity. When we study something that is complex (not simple, brief or repetitive) and specified (not random like a bunch of Scrabble tiles pulled from a bag), we have evidence that an intelligent agent is at work.

This is the very method used to detect plagiarism. If a written piece is extended and matches up too closely with something else, we can be confident that one of them is not original. I bet Judge Jones wishes he had actually studied ID before he decided to use his computer’s cut and paste feature.