The fact that nearly two-thirds of U.S. evangelicals believe that humans are born in a state of innocence reveals that the biblical teaching of original sin is not embraced by most evangelicals. The Bible, however, makes clear that all humans are “by nature children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). In other words, we are not sinners because we sin; rather, we sin because we are sinners. This truth is foundational for an accurate understanding of the gospel and of our absolute need for the grace of God in salvation.

Orlando, Fla. (September 19, 2022): A new survey from Ligonier Ministries reveals that the overwhelming majority of U.S. evangelicals have accepted a view of human identity that aligns more with American society than the teaching of the Bible.
Ligonier’s biennial State of Theology survey provides insights into the views of Americans on a wide range of Christian beliefs. This comprehensive report provides key findings on beliefs about God, truth, the Bible, ethical issues, and worship. Conducted with LifeWay Research, the survey polled a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. The complete 2022 results are now available at TheStateofTheology.com.
In 2022, 71 percent of polled U.S. adults agreed with the statement that “Everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God.” While this is unsurprising, given the influence of humanistic philosophies and worldviews in America that teach self-determinism and a view of humankind as basically good, the survey also showed that 65 percent of polled evangelical Christians agreed with this same statement.
The fact that nearly two-thirds of U.S. evangelicals believe that humans are born in a state of innocence reveals that the biblical teaching of original sin is not embraced by most evangelicals. The Bible, however, makes clear that all humans are “by nature children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). In other words, we are not sinners because we sin; rather, we sin because we are sinners. This truth is foundational for an accurate understanding of the gospel and of our absolute need for the grace of God in salvation.
Chris Larson, president and CEO of Ligonier Ministries, said:
“Absent an understanding of the holiness of God, it is unsurprising that most people do not acknowledge the depth of their sinfulness or their need for a Savior. Yet, the fact that many Christians have been so poorly or wrongly taught on this most basic of doctrines is jarring. It was Ligonier’s founder, Dr. R.C. Sproul, who often reminded us that our corruption is a radical corruption, because it goes right to the root of our humanity. It affects every part of our character and being. We must come to terms with who we are by nature—violators of God’s law who are justly exposed to His wrath, having no hope of forgiveness apart from His mercy in Jesus Christ. We aim for the results of the 2022 State of Theology survey to serve as a wake-up call to rouse Christians to more serious and active discipleship in the Scriptures. Eternal life and death are at stake, and we cannot afford to treat lightly that which God has revealed with utmost gravity.”
In addition to reviewing the official survey results, anyone may take the survey for themselves at TheStateofTheology.com. The website also features an option to create private group surveys for use by churches, classes, and more. All are encouraged to participate in these secure, private, and anonymous surveys to help them facilitate discussion and better understand the beliefs of people in their communities.
LifeWay Research surveyed a nationally representative sample of 3,011 adults in the United States, including 817 professing evangelicals. The survey was carried out from January 5 to 23, 2022. More information can be found at TheStateofTheology.com.
Evangelicals were defined by LifeWay Research as people who strongly agreed with the following four statements:

The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe.
It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior.
Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin.
Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.

Ligonier Ministries exists to proclaim, teach, and defend the holiness of God in all its fullness to as many people as possible. To that end, Ligonier’s outreach today is manifold and worldwide. Founded by Dr. R.C. Sproul in 1971, Ligonier’s teaching fellowship consists of theologians, pastors, and scholars. Ligonier publishes Renewing Your Mind and other podcasts, the Reformation Study Bible, Tabletalk magazine, books, and hundreds of teaching series. The ministry also offers an undergraduate degree program through Reformation Bible College. In addition, Ligonier hosts national and regional conferences, provides an online learning community through Ligonier Connect, streams 24-hour Christian internet radio through RefNet, answers biblical and theological questions with Ask Ligonier, pursues numerous translation efforts in other countries, and makes available thousands of unique educational resources online at Ligonier.org.
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Written by Forrest L. Marion |
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Non-competitive activities, however, may retain one’s focus on the Lord – if engaged in it thoughtfully. Again, readers may think of their favorite examples, from going for a walk or a bike ride with their children/grandchildren to a dad throwing a baseball with his son in the backyard to various other outings or indoor activities that allow for engaging in conversation or reflection on God’s sovereignty, creativity, and lovingkindness – or on the morning’s teaching and preaching. 

Among Christians, Presbyterians generally are those best attuned to the importance of the Christian Sabbath, or Lord’s Day. But this shared sense of importance does not translate to full agreement on the day’s nature or observance. For centuries, followers of Jesus Christ have differed regarding the observance of the fourth commandment.
Regardless, the Westminster Standards highlight the observance of the Lord’s Day which commemorates the resurrection of the Lord Jesus on the first day of the week. The Larger Catechism devotes no less than 7 questions – of 196 – to the fourth commandment (#115-121).
Question 117 asks, “How is the sabbath or the Lord’s day to be sanctified?” The most relevant portion of the lengthy answer is, “The sabbath or Lord’s day is to be sanctified by an holy resting all the day, not only from such works as are at all times sinful, but even from such worldly employments and recreations as are on other days lawful.” The answer to question 119 on “the sins forbidden in the fourth commandment” reiterates the forbidding of “all needless works, words, and thoughts, about our worldly employments and recreations.”
The matter of worldly recreations is the narrow topic here.
A decade ago, while serving on my presbytery’s theological examining committee, I realized that the “recreations” clause was the one nearly always mentioned by candidates taking “exceptions” to the Westminster Standards. That experience has been reinforced by articles in The Aquila Report over the years as well.
One article in 2013 by Teaching Elder (TE) Jason A. Van Bemmel observed: “The biggest objection I have to ‘worldly recreations’ is that people seem eager to engage in leisure activities that do not focus their own hearts and minds on the Lord and that require others to work in order to serve them.”
In 2015, TE Benjamin Shaw expressed the issue of post-morning-worship Lord’s day activities with both humor and insight:
So our civil culture and our theological culture alike lean against prohibiting ‘recreations’ on the Sabbath. Then, we are presented the Dickensian bogeyman of the poor children of Sabbatarians, forced to sit in uncomfortable straight-backed chairs all Sunday afternoon, dressed in their Sunday-best, while their grim-faced father reads to them the opening chapters of 1 Chronicles.    
Assuming one’s regular attendance upon divine worship in the morning at a minimum, must we choose between Sabbath afternoon “leisure activities” that do not focus on the Lord on the one hand and “grim-faced” fathers reading 1 Chronicles’ genealogical chapters to their children on the other? Is there not a more biblical, even confessional, standard to be found somewhere between those two extremes?
All Christians acknowledge the Bible as their highest authority, but challenges may arise when Scripture does not use a particular word that carries weight in one’s confessional documents. The Westminster Standards use the word, “recreations,” which does not appear in the 1599 Geneva Bible or the 1611 King James Bible, the versions most familiar to the assembly when it met several decades later. Isaiah 58:13-14 – historically the favorite Scripture passage of Presbyterians on the topic – arguably comes closest to addressing the essence of recreational activity:
If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy will on mine Holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight to consecrate it, as glorious to the Lord, and shalt honor him, not doing thine own ways, nor seeking thine own will, nor speaking a vain word,
Then shalt thou delight in the Lord, and I will cause thee to mount upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.      
Phrases such as, “. . . doing thy will on mine Holy day” and “not doing thine own ways, nor seeking thine own will,” point toward the essence of the recreations clause. In our culture, it’s all about “thine own will” – not God’s will. Even serious Christians are not exempt from such pernicious influences.
I am convinced this is where Greg Bahnsen’s thinking may help. He argued for viewing the recreations clause in the context of competitive versus non-competitive activities.*
Competitive activities by their nature focus one’s attention on the individual or one’s team. Readers may bring to mind their own examples of competition from sports to drama to music and so on. Such competitive activities promote “thine own will.” The very nature of competition means the activity must be self- or man-focused; not God-focused.
Non-competitive activities, however, may retain one’s focus on the Lord – if engaged in it thoughtfully. Again, readers may think of their favorite examples, from going for a walk or a bike ride with their children/grandchildren to a dad throwing a baseball with his son in the backyard to various other outings or indoor activities that allow for engaging in conversation or reflection on God’s sovereignty, creativity, and lovingkindness – or on the morning’s teaching and preaching.
While I cannot recall what Bahnsen may have said about King James I’s infamous – especially to the Puritans – Book of Sports, or Declaration of Sports, which was first issued in 1618 and reissued in 1633 by Charles I, without doubt the Westminster divines had this document in mind when they met in the 1640s. Some pastors, including John Davenport and Thomas Shepard, left England for America, partly because of Charles’s aggressive undermining of the Sabbath through the declaration’s reissuance (Davenport found refuge for a time in the Netherlands). Broader persecution influenced other pastors to emigrate, including John Cotton and Thomas Hooker, who traveled to America in July 1633, three months prior to the reissuance.
It is significant that several of the “lawful recreations” in which James and Charles encouraged their subjects to engage on Sabbath afternoons, were competitive in nature: “archery for men, leaping, vaulting.” The king considered them to be “exercises as may make their bodies more able for war, when we or our successors shall have occasion to use them.” This background supports the validity of viewing Westminster’s “recreations” within the framework of the competitive/non-competitive nature of Sabbath activities as Greg Bahnsen suggested.
Some writers argue for a study to address the Westminster Standards’ handling of the fourth commandment and/or the “recreations” clause. Until that happens, perhaps asking oneself whether a Sabbath activity being considered is competitive, or non-competitive, may promote a more faithful observance of the day and greater delighting in the Lord, which offers the believer a glimpse of the eternal Sabbath toward which he is headed.
Forrest L. Marion is a member of First Presbyterian Church (PCA), Crossville, Tennessee.

*Note: I’m unable to cite that roughly thirty years ago – in the olden days of audiocassettes – I listened to a (borrowed) taped message of Dr. Greg Bahnsen (1948-1995) in which he argued for viewing Sabbath “recreations” through the window of competitive/non-competitive activities. While I regret not having taken notes on his message, my family and former church members will testify that in the 1990s anything touching upon the Christian Sabbath and its observance commanded my attention; my dissertation dealt with the subject. Years later, I contacted Bahnsen Theological Seminary, but they were unable to locate this taped message. If any reader is familiar with this message of Dr. Bahnsen’s, please contact me at [email protected].
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Written by J. P. Moreland |
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
The universe is precisely fine-tuned so that life could appear. More than a hundred independent, hard facts about the universe have been discovered in the form of basic constants of nature or arbitrary physical magnitudes which are, scientifically speaking, brute facts and for which there is no further scientific explanation (e.g., the force of gravity in the universe, the charge of an electron, the rest mass of a proton, the rate of expansion resulting from the Big Bang). What blows the minds of so many is that, if any single one of these—much less all one hundred!—had been slightly larger or smaller on the order of a billionth of a percentage point or more, then no life could have appeared in the universe. The universe is a razor’s edge of precisely balanced life-permitting conditions.

The Limits of Science and Danger of Scientism
The heart of scientism is the conviction that science can explain virtually everything. If there is not a valid scientific explanation for an event or state, then that is not properly an object of our knowledge. In reality, though, there are many things that science cannot explain. And the problem is not that we lack sufficient data—the problem is that these are the sorts of things that science cannot explain, even in principle. Moreover, these things are items that we know to be true. What makes all of this especially interesting is that theism can explain them.
Let’s look at five things that theism can explain but science cannot.
1. Science Cannot Explain the Origin of the Universe
For at least three reasons, science cannot—even in principle—explain the origin of the universe.
First, science explains one aspect of the universe by appealing to another aspect of the universe, often by connecting the two by subsuming them under a law of nature. For example, we explain the formation of water by appealing to the chemical properties of hydrogen and oxygen, along with some energy-releasing event that caused the two to come together according to these chemical properties. We explain the death of the dinosaurs by appealing to different catastrophic events. In all cases of scientific explanation, one already has to have a universe in existence before scientific explanation, initial conditions, laws of nature, and so forth have something to which they can apply. Scientific explanations presuppose the universe in order for those explanations to be employed in the first place. Thus, a scientific explanation cannot be used to explain the very thing (the universe) that must exist before scientific explanation can get off the ground.
Second, scientific explanations apply to ongoing temporal states or changes of states (both are events) of various things according to relevant laws. The moving of the continents, the formation of the solar system, the development of life, the decay of uranium into lead are all events or changes of state that are explained by other events and laws that connect the events. The ongoing event of a gas retaining its pressure at constant volume is explained by the gas’s retaining its temperature according to the ideal gas law.
And so scientific explanation presupposes time (events are temporal episodes, and no sense can be given to the idea of a timeless event) and the reality of events. Two things follow from this. For one thing, science will never be able to explain the first event (the beginning of the universe) because to do so, it would have to appeal to a prior event and a law connecting them. But in this case, the origin of the universe would no longer be the first event; the prior explanatory event would be. But then, to explain this first event, one would need to postulate another prior event, and a vicious regress ensues.
For another thing, since scientific explanations tie one event to another via a law, such explanations presuppose time for those laws to be applicable. Thus, again, science cannot explain the origin of the very thing (time) that must exist before scientific explanations can be proffered in the first place.
Third, coming-into-existence is not a process but an instantaneous occurrence. Consider the process of walking into a room. One starts completely outside the room, then one is 20% into the room, then 30%, and so on, as one passes through the entrance. Finally, one is 100% in the room. But coming into existence from nothing is not a process. It is not as though the entity in question starts off being 100% nonexistent, then is 90% nonexistent and so on until it is 100% existent. Remember, by “90% nonexistent” I don’t mean that 10% of the entity fully exists and 90% is completely nonexistent. Rather, I mean that the entire entity is 10% real. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that notions like 90% nonexistent are incoherent.
Something either does or does not exist. Period. It follows that, apart from the creative activity of God, there can be in principle no reason, no explanation for why one thing—say, the universe—popped into existence as opposed to another thing— a Honda Civic, a bass’s backbone, one half of Mount Everest, or a pair of chicken wings. Science can only be applied to transitions of one thing into another, but coming into existence is not a transition; it is, as it were, a point action or instantaneous event. So science cannot in principle explain the coming-into-existence of the universe from nothing.
2. Science Cannot Explain the Origin of the Fundamental Laws of Nature
Not all laws of nature are equally fundamental. Some can be derived from others. For example, Newton’s first law of motion (an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force) builds on Galileo’s concept of inertia (the tendency of matter to resist change in velocity; objects do not spontaneously change their velocities, which will remain constant unless acted upon by friction).
However, such derivations cannot continue indefinitely. There must be—and it is widely agreed that there are—fundamental or foundational laws of nature. But the existence and precise nature of these laws cannot be explained by science, since all scientific explanation presupposes them. As far as scientific explanation is concerned, these foundational laws are simply brute givens to be used to explain other things scientifically but which themselves cannot be explained scientifically.
So, how do we explain the existence and nature of these laws? Where did they come from? There are two major options here: (1) take them as unexplainable, brute entities, or (2) provide a theistic explanation. For many thinkers, myself included, the “unexplainable-brute-entity” option is not a good one. Since the actual brute entity might not have existed, we naturally seek an explanation as to why the contingent entity exists instead of not existing. And the fundamental laws of nature are contingent realities—after all, it is easy to conceive of worlds that have different fundamental laws of nature. So why does our world contain certain fundamental laws instead of others?
This seems like a perfectly permissible question, but some atheists reject the question on the grounds that it assumes The Principle of Sufficient Reason, which either begs the question (the only reason to believe it is if one already believes in God) or is just a brute principle that atheists are free to reject. The principle has different formulations, but one is this: For every contingent existent, there is a sufficient explanation for why it exists as opposed to not existing.
Theists have responded that the Principle of Sufficient Reason does not, in fact, presuppose the existence of God, and they insist that it is a rational principle that stands behind and justifies the human quest for explanations of why certain things exist and are what they are.
The atheist seems to be committing the informal taxicab fallacy. This fallacy occurs when someone hops into a principle or system of reason and uses that principle until he no longer likes the implication of the principle (or system), whereupon he hops out of the principle (or system) and stops using it. Applied to our discussion, we use the principle of sufficient reason all the time (e.g., when your car breaks down, your mechanic assumes there is a reason for why the engine exists in a bad way as opposed to existing in the way it should, so he tries to find that reason), and it has proven itself over and over again. But when we apply the principle of sufficient reason to the existence of the fundamental laws of nature (or, indeed, to the contingency of the universe we live in), the atheist rather arbitrarily stops using the principle because it most naturally yields a theistic explanation. He or she then jumps out of the taxicab.
3. Science Cannot Explain the Fine-Tuning of the Universe
What do we mean by fine-tuning?1 Our universe contains various constants (like the gravitational constant G in Newton’s law of gravity: F=G(m1m2/r2) and certain arbitrary physical quantities (such as the specific low entropy R2 level in the universe—the amount of disorder or useful energy to do work in the universe) that are not determined by the laws of nature but, as far as science is concerned, are brute facts that are just there.2
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