Dr. Robin Collins is a Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Messiah College. Collins is the foremost defender of what is known as the teleological argument for the existence of God. He has a background in both physics and philosophy and will be discussing how the specific physical constants and conditions in the universe are finely-tuned for intelligent life and how this “fine-tuning” gives us reason to believe in a Creator.
Here is the video:
Topics:
the constants and quantities set at the origin of the universe is fine-tuned for conscious, embodied intelligences like us
three kinds of fine-tuning: 1) laws of nature, 2) constants, 3) quantities
examples of 1): gravity, electromagnetism, strong force, quantization, Pauli exclusion principle
examples of 2): gravitational constant, cosmological constant,
examples of 3): initial distribution of mass-energy
in addition to fine-tuning for life, there is also fine-tuning for discoverability
Naturalistic response to the evidence: the multiverse hypothesis
problems with the multiverse hypothesis
additional topics
I put the ones I am ready to speak on in bold. I recommend you learn those as well in order to illustrate the fine-tuning with evidence when you present it. The evidence is important because I’ve never found a single atheist who I discussed this with who could properly state the argument or understand the evidence. They talk about it without really understanding it, which is why we need to be ready to explain it to them.
Investors Business Daily has some good news for us. The Democrat Party of Venezuela has been CRUSHED in a recent election.
Excerpt:
Venezuela’s voters delivered a sledgehammer blow to the country’s ruling Chavista socialists Sunday, winning a likely supermajority in the National Assembly. It’s a great awakening from a 17-year nightmare.
Given the past two decades of near-victories, electoral fraud, chicanery and fractious political opposition mistakes, many Venezuelans are still in disbelief at the scale of the victory in the nation’s legislative elections, which have decisively handed one of Venezuela’s leading governing bodies over to the democratic, pro-free-market opposition.
As this was written, the opposition, known by its Spanish initials MUD, had declared a 112-seat, or two-thirds, supermajority in the National Assembly as a result of Sunday’s vote. The Chavistas won just 46 seats.
It’s total victory in legislative terms and will enable the legislature to throw out politicized Supreme Court justices and appoint honest ones.
The new Congress can also boot corrupt election officials and appoint fair ones. And they will even be able to declare President Nicolas Maduro — the late dictator Hugo Chavez’s hand-picked successor — mentally unstable and unfit for office, or remove him for incompetence. They can also stop his executive orders dead.
The Congress also will have the power to free the 71 or so political prisoners now rotting in Chavista dungeons without trial, including top opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. And Venezuela’s central bank will stop destroying the country’s money, now nearly worthless.
[…]Most important, the leftist government’s mismanagement of the economy — through currency controls that prevented imports of spare parts, created shortages of basics such as toilet paper and devastated the health care system — and the central bank’s infamous money-printing spree, which has pushed Venezuelan inflation to near 700%, made ordinary life for Venezuelans hellish. There also was corruption, with as much as 1 trillion dollars in oil earnings stolen or misappropriated over the years by high-living Chavista elites, whose lavish lifestyles mocked ordinary, poor Venezuelans.
Top it with the monstrous infiltration of the country by the drug lords, and the likelihood of an electoral housecleaning was perfectly clear.
Still, an element of disbelief remains, given how dirty the Chavista rulers have played their democracy game.
They have broken election rules, violated ballot secrecy, shut voters out and banned popular candidates from running. Many of those dirty tricks were evident in this election, too — the Chavistas illegally extended voting hours and campaigned at polling stations, to cite just a couple of examples.
But the opposition won anyway — with turnout so high, at 74.5%, and margins of victory so wide that the election was impossible to steal.
It helped that the the opposition had the wind at its back with the disastrous result of socialism. But it also helped that MUD had improved its electoral game over the years, learning from each near-miss election.
It also helped that MUD had strong leaders such as Maria Corina Machado and put out strong candidates with a clear, unified message — often summed up as “Down with the left.” And with all the pain of 17 years, it helped most of all that they never lost heart.
There is literally no different between the socialists of Venezuela and the Democrat Party in the United States. They are in lock step on every issue. Should the Democrat Party continue to hold power in America, we can look forward to a reckoning like this one in the future.
Two socialists shake hands: Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez
The Wall Street Journal says that the whole country is basically in the grip of ignorant socialists at every level, so there is lots to do.
Excerpt:
Pulling out of that death spiral, economists say, will require a series of painful and unpopular adjustments, rolling back more than a decade of populist and statist policies. Among the measures needed is raising the price of the world’s cheapest gasoline—which goes for less than one U.S. penny a gallon—overhauling a cumbersome and inefficient foreign-exchange system, and cutting generous social programs on which Venezuela’s poor depend.
[…]The government still controls more than 20 governorships, hundreds of mayors, the judiciary, much of the press and all auditing agencies. It will be up to Mr. Maduro whether to take steps to stabilize the economy, like loosening currency or price controls.
It’s not just Venezuela that has hit bottom under socialism. Recently, the people of Argentina also threw out their socialists after years and years of disastrous leftist policies.
The Chicago Tribune reports on last month’s election in Argentina.
Excerpt:
Under the current president, Cristina Fernandez, Argentina has become an international financial pariah. The country defaulted on debt last year in a long-running feud with hedge funds — remarkably, that was the eighth default in Argentina’s history.
Fernandez refused to settle. That’s left the country to squeak by in isolation, using protectionism and capital controls in a quixotic battle with globalism. The economy is stagnant, foreign currency reserves are dwindling and the inflation rate is around 30 percent. Last week, American Airlines said it stopped accepting pesos for ticket sales because it was tired of collecting revenue it couldn’t convert to dollars.
At times Argentina has embraced trade and economic openness, only to slip back into bad habits thanks to populist Peronistas like Fernandez. Macri, a conservative, wants to re-establish free market principles, but there are a lot of details he didn’t fully explain before his November victory because they will require some short-term pain, and he wanted to win the election.
Everything Macri is talking about makes sense. He says he will lift the capital controls that have wrecked the peso’s credibility. Like other backwaters it shouldn’t resemble, Argentina has a thriving black market because the government insists the peso is worth a lot more than its actual value. Freeing the currency would devalue it, a first step toward making Argentina more competitive.
The next big step would be to negotiate a settlement with the hedge funds that bought up Argentina’s debt after its previous default in 2002 and demand repayment. Fernandez got political mileage from attacking the “vultures,” but Macri seems to understand Argentina can’t get unstuck when it’s essentially shut out of international capital markets. He sounds like he wants to do a deal.
Macri’s got a tremendous balancing act to pull off: He’ll need to cut spending and reduce taxes without destroying the country’s big social safety net, while walking the country through a devaluation.
This is how countries that are ruled for a prolonged period by the political left eventually end up. I know so many of you lose heart and think that there is no hope, but there is hope. Even in countries where the left is running everything from the universities, to the judiciaries, to the mainstream media, there is hope.
Over the last 7 years, Obama added $10 trillion to the national debt. And although few of his Democrat low-information voters know about that, they will be able to tell the difference between prosperity and poverty when the United States reaches the Venezuela / Argentina tipping point. There comes a time when there are no more bailouts for the economics deniers. Reality wins in the end.
“If you see something suspicious, say something,” said President Obama after the Paris massacre. He’s offered similar calls for vigilance after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino. But does he mean it?
[…]Remember the so-called “clock kid” in Irving, Texas? Teenager Ahmed Mohamed brought a homemade device to school that looked like a suitcase bomb. He ignored a teacher’s advice to stash the device, which he falsely claimed was an alarm clock he had built. He brought the device into another classroom, with the alarm clock set to go off in the middle of the lesson. When hauled off to the principal’s office his answers raised enough suspicion for the police to be called. His reticent answers to them raised further suspicions, enough to warrant a brief arrest. We don’t know exactly what he said because his family — which has a history of trouble with the school and curious connections — refused to give authorities permission to release the police report on the incident.
MacArthur High School saw something and said something. Were they praised? Acknowledged by the Administration for their vigilance? No, for weeks they were verbally slapped around by Obama and the media as haters and Islamophobes. Now comes the kicker: Last night the Justice Department confirmed that it is officially investigating the school for its actions.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch told Muslim Advocates president Farhana Kher Thursday that it was “great to hear that the department has opened an investigation” into the school; that the “treatment” of Mohamed was an “issue of great concern and really struck a cord with many parents.”
So, there will definitely be a chilling effect from that investigation on others who might warn of suspicious behavior that could mean a terrorist attack.
And that’s in fact what happened with the terrorist couple in San Bernardino:
Several neighbors saw suspicious activity at the couple’s apartment, but did nothing for fear of being accused of racial profiling. They now have to carry the awful burden of wondering, “How many died because I stayed silent?”
Speaking of fear, Attorney General Lynch told the Muslim Advocates dinner Thursday night her “greatest fear” is anti-Muslim sentiment will lead to violence against Muslims in America. Even if she’s reading doctored intelligence from the White House, surely she can turn on a TV. The Russian plane attack in Egypt, the Lebanon attack, the Paris attack, the Mali attack, the San Bernardino attack, the countless numbers on our shores getting inspiration and instruction from Islamist sites. Yet her “greatest fear” is a possible backlash against members of the very religion that hosts those responsible for all the carnage.
Perhaps that attitude from the nation’s top law enforcement official explains what’s reportedly happening in Los Angeles, only an hour west of this week’s terrorist attack.
TMZ is reporting that “LAPD cops have been told not to single out Muslims in their hunt for terrorists,” with one cop admitting, “It’s a huge problem for us.”
According to the cops, LAPD brass doesn’t want officers talking to people from the Middle East unless they’re doing something “that arouses real suspicion.” Officers are also telling TMZ that when they ask questions about unusual activity — such as “tourists” photographing electrical units on buildings — they are greeted with hostility.
Has the Obama administration done a good job of preventing terrorist attacks? Does his attitude of blaming America deter terrorist attacks, or does it embolden radical Islamists to perform more attacks?
This article from the Daily Caller lists 7 terrorist attacks that occurred during the 7 years of the Obama presidency, as of July 2015.
Here is one:
In November 2009, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire in an attack at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. Hassan killed 13 people and wounded over 30 more.
In a document dated Oct. 18, 2012 obtained by Fox News, Hasan wrote: “I, Nidal Malik Hasan, am compelled to renounce any oaths of allegiances that require me to support/defend man made constitution (like the constitution of the United States) over the commandments mandated in Islam.”
The U.S. government has steadfastly refused to call Hasan’s militant slaughter a terrorist attack. Instead, federal officials have repeatedly characterized Hasan’s actions as “workplace violence.”
A U.S. military court sentenced Hasan, a military psychiatrist, to death in 2013.
And here is another:
In April 2013, Chechen brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev exploded two pressure cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
The bombings killed three people including an eight-year-old boy. Hundreds of runners and spectators were seriously injured. Seventeen people saw their limbs blown off.
Three days later, the brothers ambushed and killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev died when his brother ran over him with a stolen Mercedes SUV in the midst of a shootout with police. In April, a jury found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty of 30 criminal counts. He later received the death penalty.
These kinds of attacks have been occurring, but they are mostly ignored by a media that is desperate to cover up anything that might make the Obama administration look weak in the face of Islamic terrorism.
The Democrats’ priority is not to protect the law-abiding taxpayers who pay their salaries. Their priority is to live out their politically correct worldview, regardless of risks and threats to us. We have to remember these things in November when it is time to decide who will be in charge of national security.
WINTERY KNIGHT 