On Creationism

Hyperbole A popular ploy is just to claim there is great evidence. A couple of examples, the first from here : I believe the resurrection of Jesus Christ is an historical reality. The resurrection is on solid historical grounds, independently of what I am about to talk about. Jesus appeared to His disciples---the original skeptics of the resurrection---over a period of 40 days, offering them "many infallible proofs." They in turn went out and turned the Roman Empire upside down with the message of the cross and resurrection. In addition to the massive historical evidence for the resurrection,... The second from here : Greenleaf concluded that according to the jurisdiction of legal evidence the resurrection of Jesus Christ was the best supported event in all of history! Really? Better than the Normandy landings ? When people makes claims as wild as this, they lose all credibility right from the start. The False Dichotomy Here is a great example: Easter is not...

Christians have a strange blind spot on the question of witnesses in this area. For this page, I am going to look at this document , by Josh McDowell of Josh McDowell Ministry: The New Testament accounts of the resurrection were being circulated within the lifetimes of men and women alive at the time of the resurrection. Those people could certainly have confirmed or denied the accuracy of such accounts. The first gospel, the Gospel of Mark, was written thirty to forty years later. Was it immediately then circulated amongst the people of Jerusalem? We have no way of knowing. Suppose it was, and people came forward, saying it was false, would we have any way of knowing? There is a saying that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It should be used judicially, and in particular you should think carefully about whether evidence would be expected. In this case we would not expect the gospel authors to record people coming forward to say it was false even if that did happen. ...

The first mention of an empty tomb is in Mark. The earlier epistles of Paul give no indication of an empty tomb, and indeed 1 Corinthians 15 is quite clear that Paul believed Jesus had a new body, so no reason to suppose the old body had gone. No Venerated Tomb The tomb would have been the single most important site in the new religion; why was it not venerated? Why is there no mention in Acts or the Pauline letters of anyone visiting the tomb after the resurrection to see if the body had really gone, or indeed, visiting just because this was the place Jesus overcame death? This was supposedly the single most important event in Christian history - God resurrecting Jesus. Why was the place not venerated for that reason? Look at how Lourdes is venerated today. There is no body there, just a place where a girl claimed to have a vision. That is insignificant compared to the one place on Earth where God resurrected Jesus. The most like explanation is that the empty tomb idea o...

Was Jesus buried in a grave for criminals or an unused tomb? Jewish Burial Procedure The standard procedure for crucified Jews at that time was for a member of the Sanhedrin to ask Pilate for the body to be buried before nightfall, and this is exactly what Mark recorded for Jesus. This is from Josephus , writing about the Great Revolt, 66 AD, and referring to this very procedure. Nay, they proceeded to that degree of impiety, as to cast away their dead bodies without burial, although the Jews used to take so much care of the burial of men, that they took down those that were condemned and crucified, and buried them before the going down of the sun. In fact, the Bible has the law from which this procedure was derived. Deuteronomy 21: 22-23 "if there shall be against someone a crime judged worthy of death, and he be put to death and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree: but you shall bury him on the same day, for cursed of God is anyone ...

The resurrection of Jesus is fundamental to the Christian faith, so I thought it might be interesting to see what evidence there really is for it. Some Christians claim the evidence is overwhelming, and the only reason not to believe is you do not want to. Is that reasonable? Two Scenarios I am going to consider two different scenarios, and see how they stack up against the evidence. That certainly does not mean no other scenarios are possible; I am just picking two that seem significant to me. The first scenario is standard Christian doctrine: 1. Jesus was resurrected in his original body, and seen in that state by the apostles, first in Jerusalem, and later in Galilee, before ascending to heaven . The second scenario is rather different. It has two forms, but the effects are the same (i.e., what people experienced, and therefore the evidence we have, will be the same either way). 2a. Jesus was resurrected in a new glorified body, and seen in that state by the apostles in ...

There are plenty of anti-Christian sites that list Biblical conradictions. I think most are trivial. Okay, if you are against inerrancy, each contradiction is significant, but otherwise I do not think many really matter. However, the resurrection is fundamental to Christianity, and the contradiction there strikes me as very significant. Jesus as Prototype First, we need to consider how Jesus is relevant here. Paul is quite clear: 1 Corinthians 15:20 But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept. 21 For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. 22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. 23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ's at his coming. Jesus was the prototype. His resurrection was the first, but all good Christians can expect to be resurrected in the same way . A Spiritual Resurrection Paul goes on in his epistle to...

I was reading a web page at Christian Thinktank. One of the claims on the page (about 10% of the way down) is that people are just not morally fit to judge God: We must note that, in the first question, we (somewhat insignificant 'carbon-based life forms') are presuming to judge God's morality and character on the basis of our own! For a human being, with the incredible paucity of data we have about the universe, morality, reality, and complexity, to decide that God is less kind, less noble, less compassionate, less moral, less 'humane' than they, seems quite bizarre, in my opinion. The author considers two cases: In the latter case, we have a God that somehow creates a derivative, "smaller" creature (i.e., human) with a superior morality and better heart! So, when a person says "I refuse to worship such a heartless god" we have the absurdly strange situation in which the "effect" is somehow greater than/superior to the "caus...

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Moral Argument for God is another favourite of WL Craig. He sums it up here : 1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. 2. Objective moral values and duties do exist. 3. Therefore, God exists. Let us think about whether it actually holds water. First, I will note that the argument is valid - i.e., if we assume that premise 1 and premise 2 are true, then the conclusion must necessaily follow. But is the argument sound? Are the premises really true? As evidence of premise 2, Craig offers the example of child rape being universally considered wrong. Although you present your reservations as worries about (2), it’s evident that you agree that (2) is true, for you say not only that you are “morally repulsed” by child rape, but that you think “child rape should be universally condemned.” But does it them follow that there must be an objective morality? The argument would seem to be that if there is an issue that all humans agree on, then that ...

So the web site claims, anyway. This is based on twelve events in the creation narrative being in the right order. 1. Light separated from darkness 2. Creation of the earth covered in water 3. The separation of the dry land from the seas 4 – 6. The creation of plants in a particular order – grasses, plants with seeds and fruit bearing trees 7. The placing of the heavenly bodies in relationship to the earth. This is often explained as the clearing of the atmosphere (from one composed mostly of water vapor and carbon dioxide to one with more oxygen due to plant photsynthesis) enough to see these creations. 8-11 The creation of animal life in a particular order – fish, birds, modern land animals, live stock 12. The creation of man It is amazing what contortions some people will go through to convince themselves they are right. Right here we see: Missing bits out The author conveniently skips day two altogether. Genesis 1:6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the ...

Just to be clear, this is about what was there before the Big Bang, not Elizabethan literature! What is nothing? If I have an empty box, what is inside it? Nothing! Well, that is the simplistic answer, but in fact the box is full of air. Let us suppose inside we have a glass vessel that we can pump all the air of, is there now nothing inside it? Is a vacuum something? I am going to assume not, but light can travel through the vessel, so it does contain photons. So have an opaque, evacuated vessel. What does it contain now? A gravity field for one thing. Electromagnetic fields will be slight, but there will be present. Looks like we have to move our thought experiment to intergalactic space, and to suppose that not only is nothing here, but there is also nothing for an extremely long distance, and electromagnet and gravity fields are essentially zero. This surely is nothing... Still no. Quantum fluctuation leads to spontaneous production (and subsequent destruction) of virtual particl...