On Creationism

I came across this recently (linked from The Sensuous Curmudgeon). It is an interview with John Lennox, whom I posted about a year or so ago. For all his credentials, Lennox seems a pretty poor thinker (but I suspect that is his religion clouding his brain specificall;y when it comes to thinking about religion). When atheists ask him how it is possible for him to be both a scientist and a Christian he inquires of them: "What do you do science with?" and he points to his head to make it obvious. Most of them reply that they do science with their brains. Lennox then lets them simmer on that thought and then asks them to tell them about their brains with which they do science. "What do you really believe about it? Give me a short history of the brain," he presses them. They often say something like "that's relatively easy because the brain is the end product of the mindless unguided process," he said. "And I look at them and I sometimes smile and...

Was it crucifixion? At least one scholar has said that what happened to Jesus was not technically crucifixion, but suspending from a pole. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/7849852/Jesus-did-not-die-on-cross-says-scholar.html I do not think the distinction matters so I am not going to address that here. I am going to consider any execution by of Jesus by the Romans to be crucifixion. There was a crucifixion, but... Some non-believers think there was a cruxifixtion, but Jesus did not die. This is the position of Muslims. Islam teaches that it was made to appear that Jesus died on the cross. This is usually taken to mean some made to look like Jesus was crucified, but could include the swoon theory. This very much is an important distinction, but not one I am concerned with here. This would still imply something happened; some kind of crucifixion was a historical event. So was Jesus crucified? Scripture I do think we have good reason to think it happened. I ...

We can see evidence of glaciation all over the world, so we can see with our own eyes that there was an ice age. Even some creationists have to admit that, and so Answers in Genesis have inventing an Ice Age (with capitals!). They offer this great timeline to help us understand what actually happened: https://assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/articles/am/v8/n2/ice-age-map.pdf So we have the Flood in 2350 BC, then three generations to the Tower of Babel, about 2250 BC, and the start of the Ice Age, which then lasts six generations, to about 2000 BC, when Abram was born. That is a very quick Ice Age. Back in reality, the last ice age started 2.5 million years ago, and is still going (we are in a warmer, interglacial period). What is fascinating is how fast stuff happens in this time line. The Elephant-Kind Mastodons first appear after two generations (around 2285 BC I guess), evolved from the elephant-kind on the ark, and woolly mammoths just two generations after that. That is s...