On Creationism

 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 ...

This is an attempt by one creationist to rationalise the nested hierarchy. I found Ewert's paper here: https://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2018.3/BIO-C.2018.3 A Nested Hierarchy Let us start with evolution... Evolution predicts a nested hierarchy. If a species, A, evolves into two new species, B and C, and then B evolves into B1 and B2, while C evolves into C1 and C2, there is a nested hierarchy. All the species descended from C form a group, which is quite distinct from those descended from B, but both nest within the group descended from A. That is a simple example, but the pattern holds true in even complex structures where every child species has just one parent species. If you are familiar with HTML or XML, the same pattern is seen; every element nests inside the ones higher up the hierarchy. Or look at the file structure on your computer. Every sub-folder is nested inside a hierarchy of folders. Linnaeus observed that same pattern in biology, even...

I am not a theist, so none of these make a lot of sense to me, but I wanted to go through them so I have some familiarity. As far as I am concerned, Jesus was crucified because he was hailed as the king of the Jews, and as such was a threat to Roman law. Penal Substitution I guess this is easiest to understand. You are a horrible sinner who deserves to suffer in hell for eternity, but Jesus takes you punishment on your behalf. Apparently Jesus on the cross for a few hours is the equivalent of billions of people suffering for eternity. And it is okay to punish one person for what another person did. In fairness, even some Christians have realised this makes no sense, and hence the other theories. The idea is that God is perfectly just, and he cannot simply forgive your sins without justice being satisfied. Jesus' death gives God a loophole to show mercy... as long as you love and worship him of course. Exodus 32 has the Israelites build a golden calf, making God angry, and Moses off...

Galilee vs Jerusalem There is a tension in the gospels which seems to be between the disciples who went back to Galilee after Jesus died and those who stayed in Jerusalem - or by their respective followers. To understand this, you first have to accept that the empty tomb was made up later. What actually happened is the disciples fled Jerusalem when Jesus was arrested, and at some point weeks later Peter saw what he understood to be the risen Jesus in Galilee. I have other posts arguing for that, so I will take it as given here. What this means is that the Jerusalem sighting were all made up later. Why? Part of that may have been internal politics. This is evidenced in Luke, who dedicates 23 verses to the sighting of Jesus to two unnamed disciples near Jerusalem, on the Road to Emmaus. It is clear Luke does not think this was the first sighting; he acknowledges a previous sighting by Peter: Luke 24:33 They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven and those w...

Sy Garte is a scientist, but more importantly in this post is that he was an atheist who became a Christian. What motivated him to do that? What evidence did he find so convincing? He discusses in an interview that can be found here: https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/the-side-b-stories-sy-garte/ Well, yeah. I mean it started with quantum physics, which I had to learn as a chemistry major. I started as a chemistry major in college. And we learned all these things, but we learned them as, “This is how things work. This is what it is. There’s something called the Uncertainty Principle, which means you can never know the position and the momentum of an electron at the same time.” And I remember thinking, “You can never know? How is that possible?” But I put it out of my mind. I also did chemistry at university, and therefore also had to learn about quantum mechanics (QM). Garte asks " How is that possible? " It is possible because that is the nature of the universe. It i...