New ID Briefing Packet for Educators

Tired of misinformation about Intelligent Design?

Grumpy about people telling you what Intelligent Design is, when it isn’t?

Fed up of the ID misrepresentations in the media?

Bored by the ID = Creationism in a cheap tuxedo rhetoric?

Want to know more about what ID actually is?

Here are some valuable resources for you:

Educators packet here.

Download color version of the PDF here.

Download B/W printable version of the PDF here.

Enjoy!

William Lane Craig/Frank Zindler Debate

Ok, so this is a bit old now, but quite embarrassing for the atheist side. Check it out on the www.apollos.ws website.

Craig is like a machine gun, and Zindler was supposedly the best the atheists could find!

Lots of Greg Koukl Videos

Here they are: http://youtube.com/profile?user=STRvideos

RZIM: Ravi Zacharias Foundations Apologetics Course

The RZIM Foundations curriculum is here! Designed to introduce a comprehensive range of apologetic arguments and strategies, it features lectures by RZIM’s team of apologists including Ravi Zacharias, Michael Ramsden, Alister McGrath, Amy Orr Ewing, John Lennox, Stuart McAllister, and L.T. Jeyachandran. Students of this rigorous curriculum will become adept at recognizing the many worldviews influencing our culture and equipped to challenge the assumptions of these worldviews. With compelling topics such as The Existence of God, Establishing a Worldview, The Trustworthiness of the Scriptures, and God, Evil, and Suffering, each study is available individually allowing you to craft your own experience according to your needs and interests. Complete with an in-depth workbook, you will find the studies foster not only knowledge but also cultivate the skills to communicate that knowledge in a way that is winsome and effective. This is one of the inaugural volumes of what will eventually be a 12-part series.

Can we really know anything for certain? If so, then how? Stuart tackles what we mean by truth and how we go about evaluating truth claims.

http://shop3.gospelcom.net/epages/rzim.storefront/EN/Product/DVDAP02

The problem of evil

A friend writes:

Other than Ron Nash do you know of any other good resources on the problem of evil?

In reply:

Yes, there are lots of them. Greg Koukl at www.str.org is excellent on this; Ravi Zacharias (www.rzim.org) also has a nice piece from a Q & A session (quoted below).

The key point is learning to think about it presuppositionally. Most people struggle with this, at least initially, because they naturally think that objective morality just is. But this is 180 degrees wrong. If there is no God, there is no objective morality. Yet most people appeal to objective morality every day, which is really an acknowledgement that God exists

Following is Ravi’s piece: you should read it over and over until the force of the argument hits you like a tonne of bricks! It is a pretty simple argument, but devastatingly powerful.

Comments always welcome.

Cheers.

Some time ago I was speaking at a university in England, when a rather exasperated person in the audience made his attack upon God.

“There cannot possibly be a God,” he said, “with all the evil and suffering that exists in the world!”

I asked, “When you say there is such a thing as evil, are you not assuming that there is such a thing as good?”

“Of course,” he retorted.

“But when you assume there is such a thing as good, are you not also assuming that there is such a thing as a moral law on the basis of which to distinguish between good and evil?”
“I suppose so,” came the hesitant and much softer reply.

“If, then, there is a moral law,” I said, “you must also posit a moral law giver. But that is who you are trying to disprove and not prove. If there is no transcendent moral law giver, there is no absolute moral law. If there is no moral law, there really is no good. If there is no good there is no evil. I am not sure what your question is!”

There was silence and then he said, “What, then, am I asking you?”

He was visibly jolted that at the heart of his question lay an assumption that contradicted his own conclusion.

You see friends, the skeptic not only has to give an answer to his or her own question, but also has to justify the question itself. And even as the laughter subsided I reminded him that his question was indeed reasonable, but that his question justified my assumption that this was a moral universe. For if God is not the author of life, neither good nor bad are meaningful terms.

This seems to constantly elude the critic who thinks that by raising the question of evil, a trap has been sprung to destroy theism. When in fact, the very raising of the question ensnares the skeptic who raised the question. A hidden assumption comes into the open. Moreover, as C. S. Lewis reminds us, the moment we acknowledge something as being “better”, we are committing ourselves to an objective point of reference.

The disorienting reality to those who raise the problem of evil is that the Christian can be consistent when he or she talks about the problem of evil, while the skeptic is hard-pressed to respond to the question of good in an amoral universe. In short, the problem of evil is not solved by doing away with the existence of God; the problem of evil and suffering must be resolved while keeping God in the picture.

© 2007 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.rzim.org/slice/slicetran.php?sliceid=29

Christmas present: Letter from a Christian Citizen: A response to Sam Harris

You can get this book at an introductory price or at the heavily discounted price of 5 for $25 making them inexpensive enough for you to share with sceptical friends and even the media. We are also including a FREE DVD with every book. This DVD is of a ‘hard hitting’ video clip showing the irrationality of the claims of Dawkins and Harris. Also included are PDFs of related CMI articles and some video clips featuring CMI scientist Dr Jonathan Sarfati.

Get Letter from a Christian Citizen and the DVD Imagine … there’s no God here.

New book: The Design of Life

http://www.thedesignoflife.net

Excerpts from the book…

“Most of origin-of-life research is as relevant to the real problem of life’s origin as rubber-band powered propeller model planes are to the military’s most sophisticated stealth aircraft.” (Ch.8)

“The origin of information is not a problem of chemistry. Chemistry can be a carrier of information, but it cannot be its source.” (Ch.8)

“Chemists typically do not concern themselves with the problem of the origin of information because their work presupposes a smart chemist ready to provide it!” (Ch.8)

“The claim that natural laws are sufficient to account for the origin of life is far-fetched. Natural laws work against the origin of life. Natural laws describe material processes that consume the raw materials of life, turning them into tars, melanoids, and other nonbiological substances that thereafter are completely useless to life.” (Ch.8)

“For Clarence Darrow, evolution justified a biological determinism that turned humans into puppets of their evolutionary past.” (Ch.9)

“Darwinists have traditionally hidden behind the complexities of biological systems to shelter their theory from critical scrutiny. Choose a biological system that is too complex, and one can’t even begin to calculate the probabilities associated with its evolution. Consider the eye. A widely held myth in the biological community is that Darwin’s theory has explained the evolution of the vertebrate eye. In fact, the theory hasn’t done anything of the sort.” (Ch.7)

Playground Slide Manufactured in China Declared "Dangerous" by the American Consumer Union.

Slide Design Using Genetic Algorithms* is Blamed. Major Product Recall Announced.

The American Consumer Union (ACU) has declared the XD133 Slow Down Slide unsafe for children.  The slides, distributed in the United States and Canada by the Happy Red Slice Playground Company, are manufactured in China.  After two weeks of testing and mounting hospital bills for skin grafts, ACU claims the slide causes serious chafing and abrasions on children.

The ACU traced the origin of the slide’s flaw to the evolutionary computer program used to design the slide. We talked to Chuck Cheung Leung, spokesman for the Evolution Revosoft Company in Nanjing, China who was responsible for writing the design code.

http://cedros.globat.com/~thebrites.org/News/Slide.html

Flash New Intelligent Design Website

http://www.intelligentdesign.org/

“… www.intelligentdesign.org is not a Discovery Institute focused website, but rather a site that highlights the websites owned and operated by a number of pro-ID organizations, scientists and scholars, such as the Intelligent Design Network, Access Research Network, and Uncommondescent.com.”

I Liked the Old Atheists Better

William Dembski

Philosopher Antony Flew used to be the most prominent atheist in the English-speaking world. In the last decade, however, that has changed.

Unlike Flew, who has always been civil and insightful, a new breed of atheists, who are crass and unruly, has supplanted him, notably, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins. Also, Flew is no longer an atheist.

Flew’s newfound belief in God and his assessment of today’s neo-atheism are both described in his delightful new book (coauthored with Roy Varghese), There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

More here.

Finnish school shooting: Student social Darwinist dies, kills eight others

Do beliefs have implications? Many people argue in the negative. “His private life has no bearing on his ability to operate in the job”.

Well, this is plainly true in some cases, like, whether you prefer french vanilla or banana flavored ice-cream. Or perhaps which football team you support. But what about a person’s views on the deeper things in life, their worldview, their noetic structure? Can these things really have no effect on their actions?

Finnish school shooting: Student social Darwinist dies…

Exciting stuff … Rising Christian Apologists

Decision Magazine has posted its interview with atheist-turned-Christian-apologist Lee Strobel. Strobel gives an overview of the apologetics landscape and provides a useful list of some rising Christian apologists.

I’m excited about the landscape of Christian apologetics right now. We’ve got some terrific young scholars and experts who are rising to the surface. People like Sean McDowell, Chad Meister, Mike Licona, Alex McFarland, Greg Koukl, Mark Mittelberg. There are a lot of really sharp individuals whom God is using to provide Christians with strong reasons for their faith. And I think we’re going to continue to see young apologists who are well-trained, godly individuals. I’m seeing more seminaries and more Christian colleges taking apologetics seriously.

I think we’re seeing a new dawn for Christian apologetics. The time is right for Christians to stand up in a humble but persuasive way to tell the world that our beliefs in Jesus Christ are rooted in a strong bedrock of historical reality.

Strobel has his own stockpile of apologetics resources. Also, for more on apologetics, see John Frame’s Apologetics to the Glory of God and his website.

Watch the Debate: What Has Atheism Done for Us?

Christopher Hitchens versus Dinesh D’Souza

[Watch the debate by clicking here]

Download the .wmv file using Flashget at this address:
mms://216.75.61.152/xstream/neproductions/tkc/debate.wmv?MSWMExt=.asf

http://www.townhall.com/…what_has_atheism_done_for_us

My new book What’s So Great About Christianity, just out, is already an amazon.com bestseller, a Wall Street Journal bestseller and No. 16 on the New York Times bestseller list. On Saturday C-Span broadcast my debate with God Is Not Great author Christopher Hitchens. Many people have commented that this is the best debate on the topic of Christianity v. Atheism that has yet been held. If you haven’t seen it, you can find the debate on my website dineshdsouza.com. Following the debate, AOL posted the video on its main page, and asked people to make up their minds and vote on who won. Modesty prevents me from disclosing the answer.

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, watched the debate and reported with some agitation that the audience seemed to be applauding more for me than for Hitchens. Dawkins commented on his website that the New York crowd must have been a “dopey” lot. But if you listen to the debate, you will see that both atheists and believers were well represented. The audience applause was initially stronger for Hitchens, and only as the debate went on did it trend markedly toward me. So is Dawkins suggesting that the audience was very intelligent to start with but became more “dopey” as the debate went on? More likely we are seeing evidence of the “Dawkins delusion,” an unwillingness to use good sense and face facts when Dawkins’ own belief system is called into question.

Interview with Dr. William Lane Craig: Handling Doubt