To Charlotte for the NCCA Conference

October 11-14, 2018

We left on Thursday, October 11, to travel to Charlotte for the National Conference on Christian Apologetics, which we have attended for the past several years. Hurricane Michael was making its way across Georgia and the Carolinas, so we traveled by I-85 to try to stay west of the storm path.

On the night of October 10, the storm was making its way across Georgia after battering the Florida panhandle, and we got pouring rain all night. By Thursday morning when we left, we had mostly clear weather because the fast-moving storm was already in the Carolinas. We had good weather almost all the way, but caught up with the storm in the outskirts of Charlotte.

Blissfully unaffected by the raging storm a hundred miles to the east of us, we had a pleasant stop at the welcome center at the South Carolina line, and I had a good time watching this Gulf fritillary butterfly. The air was exceptionally clear and we had mostly blue skies.

John and Mary Keefe came to the Quality Inn to pick us up. We enjoyed dinner with them at a restaurant they like on Pineville-Matthews Road. It is always good to get together with them.

On Friday, October 12 we arrived at Calvary Church early for the start of the Apologetics conference.

The beautiful Calvary Church is a great venue for the conference, and we always feel very privileged to hear outstanding speakers.

The first speaker we heard was J. Warner Wallace, whom I would rate as the outstanding presenter at the conference for the last two years. He presented the ideas he has framed in his book "God's Crime Scene". Generally drawing from his experience as a cold-case detective as he did in "Cold Case Christianity", he sets up the scene as an investigation. The slide he has projected behind him sets up an investigation of the scene of a dead man in a room where he has to decide whether it is a homicide. If the whole scene can be explained from within the room, then it is an accident or suicide. But if not, there was an intruder and it must be investigated as a homicide. The small images of other slides indicate his process of examining whether the universe can be explained from the inside, as having created itself from nothing. He did an excellent job of going through the fine-tuning arguments.

Later in the morning I went to hear Jeff Zweerink on "Did the Universe Really Begin to Exist". I was familiar with the material, but I was impressed with the fact that he did deal with the ambiguities introduced by quantum gravity, inflation, and the idea of the multiverse.
We went to hear Bob Stewart, a colleague of Jeff's at NOBTS, in his session "What's Wrong With the New Atheism?". I particularly wanted to thank him for his essay criticizing the worldview of naturalism - I've read it five times or more.
When I went up to thank him and we introduced ourselves, he said "I know that name!". He has traveled with Jeff to some common speaking locations at Glorietta, NM and in Oklahoma.

During the afternoon we went to Frank Turek's excellent presentation of "What is God Like? Look to the Heavens", using astronomy and the fine-tuning argument. I was so impressed that I bought the video in the hopes of using it with our church's youth.
Ravi Zacharias was the speaker for the evening session. We had never heard him in person before. He was really impressive: articulate, eloquent and compassionate.

We ended the day with a Question and Answer session with Richard G. Howe, Richard Land, Josh McDowell, and Ravi Zacharias.

Saturday, October 13

We went to Hugh Ross's early talk on "The God Who Wants Us to Test Him". Very familiar material to me since I have read all his books, but he is impressive with his slides and illustrations. Chip Ingram gave an excellent address on "Re-thinking Apologetics for the 21st Century"
I went to Ken Wolgemuth's session "Radiometric Dating - Fact or Fiction" I was pleased to see him presenting here, and pleased with his recent interaction with Reasons to Believe. He did an impressive job with the correlation of tree rings, carbon dating and lake varves. He was very well received.

We ended the afternoon with a panel discussion "Is the Age of the Earth a Matter of Biblical Authority?" with Hugh Ross of RTB, Randy Guliuzza of ICR, Richard G Howe and Norman Geisler.

Since the Saturday sesson ended early enough, we were able to go out to dinner again with Mary and John Keefe.

Sunday, October 14

We met Mary and John for the morning worship service at Calvary Church at 9:30.

We enjoyed the magnificent choir and organ in the Calvary Church sanctuary.

We said our goodbyes to John and Mary in the foyer of the church and headed south into South Carolina. We had made connections with Carole Richardson and her family, so we picked up a fruit basket and some food for our lunch and planned to meet them at their new house to have lunch with them when they arrived from church.

After lunch with Carole and her niece's family with their two daughters, we were able to visit with Carole in her room.

We talked with Trish and the girls about this beautiful country home location they now have. You can see the swimming pool behind the house, and all the open country around.

We came down I-77 and then headed for Atlanta on I-20. I was getting hints of irridescence in the clouds, so I asked Brenda to shoot through the window. We didn't get any true irridescence, but we enjoyed the ever-changing colors of God's paintings on the evening sky. 6:51pm.

I kept watching the unusual changing colors at the edges of these clouds. 6:57pm.

Approaching Atlanta we met a lot of traffic coming out of the city, even though we were still a half-hour away. 6:58pm

With the sun below the horizon, the colors got richer. 7:20pm.

We were glad to be home, but were grateful for the richness of the weekend's experience and felt very blessed.