OPINION
So a 39 year old father of two is knifed to death in Auckland. The killer will be caught, his DNA matched to confirm that he is indeed the killer, and millions will be spent on a court case and 15 or so years of meals and accommodation and rehab in prison.
In the meantime, the Mohini family will go thru a living hell (to quote Bob Dylan) and the children will live with no earthly father for the rest of their lives.
I think our society has its sums wrong. The killer has taken a life that was not his to take. Only God has the right to take another life because only God holds the privileged position of creator and sustainer of all things. The killer has taken the life of a human being, a person made in the Imago Dei. A person stamped with the image of God in his very being. The killer has violated the divine law, and now our justice system will almost certainly practice further injustice towards the Mohini family by showing them that the life of a husband/father is worth only 15 or so years.
Apologetics 315 has a bunch of stuff about this debate online, including the MP3 which is over 2 hours long and includes questions and answers from the floor.
Moderator of the debate, Dr. Bradley Monton has kindly put up a review of the debate on his website here.
I was really hoping for some knock-down arguments from Ayala given his amazing academic credentials and outstanding ranking in the world of evolutionary biology. But once again, I think there was little gunpowder in the evolutionist’s chamber and we are all intellectually the worse for it.
I wonder if Richard Dawkins will have time to listen to the debate (that could have been his) and reconsider debating Craig.
Reading the summary on Bradley Monton’s website, I wonder if Dawkins may regret NOT taking up the offer and debating Craig, especially if he is so sure of his incredible claims. Why? Because apparently Craig conceded afterward that he is very inexperienced at debating this subject, so Dawkins could have blasted some big holes in ID and its followers like myself by hitting us between the eyes David Tua style with the evidence that we keep asking for.
As for a winner, my feeling is that we can notch up another win for Craig, but overall the debate could have been a lot better.
Lastly, it seems to me that for such a smart guy, Ayala’s should have a worldview that is much more coherent. He seems to believe in God, but rejects any notion that we can detect God’s handiwork in biology. He also seems really confused about theology — even though he has a doctorate in theology!!! I wonder if he has ever come across the essential doctrine of the fall because it seem to me that it plays a vital role in so many of the criticisms he has of “design” in biology. If Ayala rejects both general revelation and special revelation, upon what does he base any belief in God at all? Why not just go the whole hog and ditch God-belief altogether?
A dvd by Dr John Blanchard
Based on the book of the same title – which is available for purchase online.
Part of a series of dvds by John Blanchard (same time & venue).
Sponsored by
Grace Reformed Baptist Church
Palmerston North
How Could God Command Genocide in the Old Testament? is the question under discussion on Justin Taylor’s blog. Certainly something worth reading imo.
The MP3s are up and ready to listen (or you can watch)
Here are the names of the speakers: Dinesh D’Souza, Norman Geisler, William Lane Craig, Greg Koukl, Darrell Bock, and JP Moreland. What a fantastic lineup!!!
Here is the page:
http://saddleback.com/mediacenter/services/currentseries.aspx?site=yDi0V4EwP58=&s=OsqcpA0SUkE=
http://apologetics315.blogspot.com/ should have the MP3s linked pretty soon…..
A dvd by Dr John Blanchard
Part of a series of dvds by John Blanchard (same time & venue):
- Saturday 31st October: Does God believe in atheists?
- Saturday 28th November: Is God past His sell-by date?
Sponsored by
Grace Reformed Baptist Church
Palmerston North
The following is cut and pasted (emphasis added) from Bill Craig’s latest newsletter. Lots of exciting stuff happening around the world. I am especially interested in On Guard which sounds like a must-have item!
Meanwhile, I continue work on a couple of book projects. Chad Meister and my book God Is Great, God Is Good, which is a wide-ranging response to the so-called New Atheism represented by the likes of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins, is currently in press and should be out very soon with Inter-Varsity Press.
I’m also working with the editors and designers at David C. Cook on my On Guard, which will be a training manual for laymen in defending their faith. Because there are so many graphics in this book in the form of pictures, side bars, boxes, and so on, Cook is taking the unusual step of asking their designers to design every single page in the book to ensure an attractive and engaging appearance. So I’m very pleased at the efforts they’re putting into this book.
My scholarly research continued to advance this month. Prof. Ken Perzyck, who organized the conference I spoke at in New Zealand last year (see the July 2008 newsletter), directed me to an article by a Swedish philosopher who provided just the insight I needed to solve a problem I’ve been working on for some time now. I think it was a real breakthrough moment in my research, and I feel confident to move forward on it.
by James W. Sire
Dr. Sire begins his talk by asserting that the mechanism of belief is inescapable in life. In addition, the question of why we believe what we do has been of ultimate importance for all people, at all times, and in all places. Arguing that we must learn to make the fine distinction between reasons to believe and causes of belief, Dr. Sire examines the social, psychological, genetic, and religious theories of belief by employing this distinction to each category. Finally, Dr. Sire argues that what one believes must cohere to reality, and he offers several arguments that the Christian faith is a system of belief that does just this.
MP3: http://static.veritas.org/media/files/vt-sire_ucsb.mp3
This is on www.BeThinking.org in the UK…
http://www.bethinking.org/what-is-apologetics/helping-students-think-about-apologetics.htm
It begins:
“Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.” – Euripides
I’ve no idea what Euripides really meant by that, but I know we all do have questions. University in particular is a time to ask questions and to find answers, and that goes for our personal and religious beliefs as well as our academic subject. Christian apologetics provides reasons for our beliefs – but how can we get that into the hands, eyes or ears of our student friends?
Monday, 25 May 2009, 10:46 am
Article: Salient
A snippet from the full article:
The historical discipline of Apologism is built around the concept of truth and how it relates to religious belief. Trevor Mandar, described as one of New Zealand’s foremost Christian Apologists, runs seminars to help Christians give a clear reason for their faith. He says an understanding of truth is an essential foundation of belief.
“There are a variety of ways for people to think about truth, but only one is undeniable. Truth is what the facts are, truth corresponds to reality. No matter what you believe, this is something people from all religions can agree with… People tend to define truth by their experience and beliefs. Once you recognise that this is not an objective definition of truth, it’s a good place to start for inter-faith discussion.”
Mandar says self-professed atheists fail to acknowledge their own set of subjective beliefs. “Atheists deny an ultimate standard of right and wrong, yet an individual may still follow the belief of their community or peers even if there is no logic in it.”
By Dr. Peter Gentry, Professor of Old Testament Interpretation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Grab the MP3 lecture here.
The entire curriculum of The Theology Program is now for free on iTunes as well as all the electives. Here is some of the material: Introduction to Apologetics & Apologetic Methods with Robert Bowman; Christian Philosophy with Paul Copan. All on MP3 via iTunes!
I have a friend who describes herself as a “disinterested agnostic”. For several years I have tried to understand where she is coming in terms of her worldview. She is quite reluctant to talk to me about these things, which is perhaps understandable. She has been known to make some rather strong assertions regarding morality — for example, female circumcision, treatment of women in Afghanistan, and “white-flight” from schools that apparently have too many Muslims and indigenous attendees.
Recently she wrote about the latter on her blog, to which I responded:
I don’t personally like racism, and certainly feel emotionally for those who suffer at the hands of others, simply because their appearance is different due to minute differences in genetic coding.
However, at an intellectual level, I find it much more difficult to reject racism as evil. Indeed, to believe racism is actually evil, I would have to believe first that evil actually exists.
But how do I get to this realization?
If you are thinking: “what a moron — of course evil exists”, then convince me as to how you arrived that that conclusion.
Stating “this is evil” or “that is evil” is only making assertions, and even racists are good at making assertions. For an assertion to carry any weight, it requires a foundation, lest it just be merely an empty assertion.
So what do you think? Does she have a case, or is she being inconsistent with her worldview? Is she making baseless assertions? Or am i just being too hard on her?
On Tuesday night, I debated atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, at Virginia Commonwealth University. The topic was, “Does God Exist?”
Thanks be to God (and to you for your prayers) because I don’t think the debate could have gone much better. There were several atheists who approached me afterwards to say that I had won.
One young lady actually apologized for being an atheist! Her position was not well represented, and she said that the arguments for God were.
Hitchens was his usual charming and witty self (I really like him and said as much), but he did not answer any of the eight arguments that I presented for the existence of God. And as many in the audience acknowledged, he dodged nearly all of my questions.
Here is the introduction of a long e-mail sent to me two hours after the debate by a VCU Philosophy professor who attended (this professor told me that he is completely “non-religious”):
Dear Dr. Turek, I wanted to say once again that I greatly enjoyed your talk and that, in my judgment, you clearly and unequivocally prevailed against Hitchens. Your two mind-body arguments were, I thought, very good, as were your modernizations of the cosmological argument and the teleological argument. I was also moved by your argument that, given how vanishingly close to zero are the chances of there being any sort of life, let alone intelligent life, it is more reasonable to infer that there is a God than it is to infer that there isn’t — the first an inference, but not the latter, being an ‘inference to the best explanation’, as philosophers of science would say.
Read the rest here.
Here are some observations from a Hitchens fan who was at the debate. Sounds like Turek won the debate, but Hitchens was not in great form (unwell perhaps?). Enjoy.
http://rudyhenkel.livejournal.com/2726.html
Anyone know where the MP3s are?
This should be really exciting for those who like a lively debate!
Frank is from this site: http://www.crossexamined.org/
Check it out. Frank is “in ya face!” and so is Christopher Hitchens — so this should be a fun debate. See a short video of Frank on his website above.
Watch the video here.
- General Editor: Ted Cabal
- Associate Editors: Chad Owen Brand, E. Ray Clendenen, Paul Copan, and J. P. Moreland
- Contributors: Charles Colson, John Frame, Norman L. Geisler, Al Mohler, Ravi Zacharias, and dozens more
- Broadman & Holman Publishing Group | 1999, 2007
Sample Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11
Human beings are the only creatures who ask questions. Major questions.
- Can I know that God exists?
- Am I the product of a blind evolutionary process or was I created by God?
- How strong is the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection?
- Is the Bible reliable and true?
- Do I have a destiny beyond my life on earth?
- Can evil be reconciled with belief in God who is both all-powerful and all-loving?
You might find this useful. This is James White’s 3 part series on consistent apologetic methodology. He does it in light of specific apologetics debates, which makes it more useful too.
- http://www.aomin.org/podcasts/20080722fta.mp3
- http://www.aomin.org/podcasts/20080724fta.mp3
- http://www.aomin.org/podcasts/20080729fta.mp3
Homepage is www.aomin.org.
And here it is…
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=STRvideos
Lots of great stuff here!
