On Creationism

Lennox is a professor of mathematics who gets cited a lot by Christians because of his academic credentials. While I assume he is knowledgeable in maths, his apologetics are pretty poor! My last post collected some of his claims from various web sites, but there is one further I want to look at that gets more into the detail. Quotes on that web page are taken from the documentary movie “Against the tide” by Pensmore Films, in which the actor Kevin Sorbo interviews Professor John Lennox. I have not seen the movie. https://georgesjournal.net/2021/07/29/john-lennox-against-the-tide-in-history/ In this first quote, Lennox is discussing the issue of Jesus' existence. The interesting thing is ancient historians, whose job is to investigate the rationality of history, are agreed on it. The apostle Peter is one of the most important eyewitnesses in reporting the facts about Jesus. There is pretty strong evidence that he was the main source of the gospel of Mark. So eyewitness testimony is ...

Lennox is a professor of mathematics who gets cited a lot by Christians because of his academic credentials. While I assume he is knowledgeable in maths, his apologetics are pretty poor! Here is a page where he discusses evidence for the resurrection (as part of an interview). https://scienceforthechurch.org/2021/03/16/john-lennox-on-the-resurrection/ "You cannot argue against miracles in principle." Lennox spends a lot of time on this, and I accept his point. We cannot just rule out miracles. But that is a long, long way from proving a specific miracle happened. So let us see what he does have: "The existence of the Christian church throughout the world is an indisputable fact. What explanation is adequate to explain the transformation of the early disciples… What could have been powerful enough to set all of this going?" "If we were to ask the early Church, they would answer at once that it was the resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, they maintained that the very ...

Psalm 22 is not Prophecy Christians claim Psalm 22 is a prophecy about Jesus. It starts " My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? "; Jesus' last words on the cross - so the gospels tell us - and goes on to describe the crucifixion. However, an alternative scenario is that when Jesus was crucified, none of the disciples were around to see what happened, so they made it up, based on Psalm 22 (and other sources in the Old Testament). After all, why would Jesus, apart of the trinity, lament being abandoned by said trinity? In this scenario, Psalm 22 is a prayer by King David, worried about the surrounding nations, who were all threatening to overrun his nation. Some verses that Christians are obliged to ignore: Psalm 22:2My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest. Jesus was on the cross just a few hours, not a day and a night.  More likely this is about the nation of Israel, under threat from its neighbours for many days. Psalm 22:6 But I ...

CS Lewis is popular with Christians, so it is worth looking at what he said. The World's Last Night is an essay he published in 1960. It can be found on-line here . In particular I want to focus on just two paragraphs. Here is the first But there is worse to come. “Say what you like,” we shall be told, “the apocalyptic beliefs of the first Christians have been proved to be false. It is clear from the New Testament that they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime. And, worse still, they had a reason, and one which you will find very embarrassing. Their Master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion. He said in so many words, ‘this generation shall not pass till all these things be done.’ And he was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world than anyone else.” This is a good summary of the problem Lewis is trying to resolve. He goes on:  It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible. Yet how teasing, also, that within f...

 To me, the idea of a God who tortures billion of people by casting them into a lake of fire for eternity is horrific. When you couple that to claims the same God is perfectly good and all-loving, you have good grounds for rejecting Christianity as incoherent nonsense. I will note in passing that many Christians reject the idea of hell, but it is well established in the Bible, so in doing so they are rejecting their own holy scripture. This post is about how Christians reconcile God torturing billions with the other claims made about God. More specifically, I am looking at how William L Craig explained it in a debate some years ago. A transcript of the debate is here. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/can-a-loving-god-send-people-to-hell-the-craig-bradley-debate On the one hand, the Bible teaches that God is love, and yet, on the other hand, it warns that those who reject God face everlasting punishment, and it contains frequent warnings about the danger of going to hel...

Picard is an MIT professor; a scientist who became a Christian. Some quotes from Picard's talk she gave on "Intellectual Assurance Christianity is Sound"... https://web.media.mit.edu/~picard/personal/ccc-talk.php "But the risks I take are insignificant compared to the issue at hand. The issue is twofold: first, what is the truth? And second, what is your response to it? By truth, I mean objective truth. Truth can be known subjectively, but it also exists outside one's subjective experience. Beware of the trendy relativism that pervades much thinking today -- if you (absolutely) believe there's no absolute truth then you need to come to grips with a problem with your thinking first." She is telling us she has objective reasons for thinking Christianity is true. Her reasons are not emotional, not because it gives her a warm, fuzzy feeling, but because there are evidence and reasons that mean we can be sure it is true. That is a high bar she is setting. In ...

Early Christians wanted to appeal to gentiles, so made up ways whereby they could just ignore the rules of the OT. In effect they were selling Judaism Lite - all the history of Judaism, but no need to be circumscribed! Modern Christians want to be able to tuck in to lobster and pork, so maintain this pretence that Jesus changed the laws of the OT. The truth is that he never did, and indeed was quite clear on that. Mat 5:17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you t...

The Jewish view of the messiah in Jesus' time was of a man appointed by God to be their new king, and so necessarily a direct male-line descendant of David, who would be adopted as God's son, and would lead Israel to victory over the oppressor of the day. Clearly this changed in Christianity; and modern Christians have a very different idea of what messiah means. How quickly did the concept evolve? Obviously the idea that the messiah would lead Israel to victory died when Jesus was crucified, but it was mutated into a victory over death , at least by the time Paul was writing. 1 Corinthians 15:55-57 ’Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” I believe that other than that, Paul's view of the messiah was the Jewish view. He certainly believed Jesus was a descendant of David, who was appointed to the position of messia...

 This is something I wrote about ten years ago responding to a guy called Joe Hinman (aka Metacrock), who uses Hood's "M Scale" to prove mystic experience come from God. I think I posted in on a forum blog, probably at CARM. I am reproducing it here for (my own) historical interest. The point here is that the M scale seeks to quantify mystical experiences, but does not in any way lead to the conclusion that God actually exists. Here then is the post... The C Scale I want to introduce the C Scale. The C Scale is something I have invented to measure people's experiences of commuting. This is, of course, a parody of the M Scale, but if you can see the flaws in my argument about the C Scale, you will see the flaws in Metacrock's argument too. If you cannot spot the flaws, you will have to accept that everyone works at the same place! Claim: We All Work At The Same Place That may surprise you, but it can be shown to true. Prof T. Raffic did some research and found thes...

This is responding to this blog post: https://thinkingtobelieve.com/2019/04/21/the-historical-evidence-for-the-resurrection-of-jesus-a-short-case-2/ Dulle starts by saying, very reasonably: You might be thinking that this is not fair because the gospels and Paul’s epistles were written by Jesus’ disciples, and therefore are biased.  That may be true, but all historical documentation is biased.  That does not prevent historians from sifting through the material to discover what is historical versus what is not.  They don’t need to presume the NT documents are divinely inspired or inerrant. He goes on to give some criteria (and he explains them in the post): The date and number of testimonies Eyewitness testimony Criterion of embarrassment Lack of embellishment Coherence From there he goes on to say what historians consider to be facts. The first is that " Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate ", and that is fine; not going to disagree with that. Jesus was buried in Joseph ...

 The "Warfare Worldview" is one way Christians try to resolve the Problem of Evil.  Quotes are from here , on the ReKnew web site, by Greg Boyd. The trinitarian warfare worldview seeks to reconcile our experience of radical evil with the conviction that reality is created and sustained by an all-loving, all-powerful God. Six principles form the foundation for this view. These principles are based on Scripture’s account of God’s battle with Satan as well as our experience with the war-zone reflected in the world around us. In this view our world is a battleground, and God is engaged in an on-going war with Satan. There are some big theological issues to ask about that - the most obvious being why an all-powerful god allows Satan to continue. It does not matter how powerful Satan is, if God is all-powerful he must be able to readily defeat Satan any time he wants. If there is an on-going war between God and Satan then either God is not all-powerful, and indeed he is comparable ...