Monthly Archives: May 2018

Videos

William Lane Craig lectures on the moral argument at Georgia Tech

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Making sense of the meaning of atheism
Making sense of the meaning of atheism

This video has 3 parts, as well as questions and answers in individual clips.

For those who cannot watch the video, you can read this essay by Dr. Craig which covers exactly the same ground as the video. The essay is for Christians already familiar with basic apologetics.

Part 1 of 3:

Part 2 of 3:

Part 2 of 3:

Here’s a quick couple of quotes from the essay for those who cannot watch:

If there is no God, then any ground for regarding the herd morality evolved by homo sapiens as objectively true seems to have been removed. After all, what is so special about human beings? They are just accidental by-products of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time. Some action, say, incest, may not be biologically or socially advantageous and so in the course of human evolution has become taboo; but there is on the atheistic view nothing really wrong about committing incest. If, as Kurtz states, “The moral principles that govern our behavior are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion,”5 then the non-conformist who chooses to flout the herd morality is doing nothing more serious than acting unfashionably.

The objective worthlessness of human beings on a naturalistic world view is underscored by two implications of that world view: materialism and determinism. Naturalists are typically materialists or physicalists, who regard man as a purely animal organism. But if man has no immaterial aspect to his being (call it soul or mind or what have you), then he is not qualitatively different from other animal species. For him to regard human morality as objective is to fall into the trap of specie-ism. On a materialistic anthropology there is no reason to think that human beings are objectively more valuable than rats. Secondly, if there is no mind distinct from the brain, then everything we think and do is determined by the input of our five senses and our genetic make-up. There is no personal agent who freely decides to do something. But without freedom, none of our choices is morally significant. They are like the jerks of a puppet’s limbs, controlled by the strings of sensory input and physical constitution. And what moral value does a puppet or its movements have?

[…]Moreover, if atheism is true, there is no moral accountability for one’s actions. Even if there were objective moral values and duties under naturalism, they are irrelevant because there is no moral accountability. If life ends at the grave, it makes no difference whether one lives as a Stalin or as a saint. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky rightly said: “If there is no immortality, then all things are permitted.”

If you want a much shorter, slicker version of this argument to share, Reasonable Faith has produced this nice 5-minute video that you can tweet or share on your Facebook page or whatever:

The moral argument is the easiest argument in the world to discuss with non-Christians, as everyone has to have an answer to questions like “what makes humans valuable?” and “why should I do the right thing when it goes against my self-interest?” and “will evildoers who escape justice in this life be punished when they die?” and “do humans have free will to make moral choices?” These are interesting questions, and people can just give their opinion and then think about it as they discuss it.

If you want to show this lecture and Q&A to your apologetics group, you can find the DVD here.

You can also read a debate transcript where Dr. Craig puts his ideas to the test, against Dr. Richard Taylor. I found this debate very helpful for answering the question that everyone should be able to answer: “why should I be moral?”

News

Democrat Nancy Pelosi joins the mainstream media in defending MS-13 gang from Trump

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By now, everyone has heard that Donald Trump, in answering a question about MS-13 from Fresno, CA police, called MS-13 gang members “animals”. The Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media disagreed with characterizing MS-13 gangsters as animals. Let’s see a few reactions from the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media, then we’ll see what MS-13 does.

First, the facts, from the non-partisan Real Clear Politics:

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi responded to President Trump calling violent MS-13 gang members “animals,” at her weekly press briefing Thursday morning. Pelosi says Trump’s comments as reported are a new low, and make her wonder if the president believes “we are all God’s children” or not.

“When the president of the United States says about undocumented immigrants, ‘these are not people, these are animals,’ you have to wonder, does he not believe in the spark of divinity? In the dignity and worth of every person? ‘These are not people, these are animals,’ from the president of the United States.”

“Every day you think you’ve seen it all, along comes another manifestation of why their policies are so inhumane,” she said.

“Calling people animals is not a good thing,” she said, before ending the news conference and walking out.

Even radically leftist CNN makes it clear that Trump was talking about MS-13:

CNN agrees: Trump was calling MS-13 "animals"
CNN agrees: Trump was calling MS-13 “animals”

But that makes no difference to Nancy Pelosi. She wants to open the borders to let them in, because they have a “divine spark”. Pro-amnesty groups joined Pelosi in denouncing Trump’s condemnation of MS-13. Liberal journalists from National Affairs and Huffington Post and Business Insider and CNBC and MSNBC and Think Progress and the New York Times and NBC News (Andrea Mitchell) the Washington Post (Jennifer Rubin) and CBS News defended MS-13. (See this Daily Wire article for all the tweets from those sources)

Here’s MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell:

Trump is Hitler, says the mainstream news media
Trump is Hitler, says the mainstream news media

Those tweets are still up! This is not a misunderstanding – they know Trump was talking about MS-13.

So what does MS-13 do, exactly?

Beating little girls with baseball bats: (ABC News)

The source explained Ayala-Rivera, a high-ranking local MS-13 leader who goes by the nickname “Noctorno,” pimps out a number of underage girls from a number of states. On Aug. 1, 2017, the source said Pena-Rodriguez, Romero-Rivera, Ayala-Rivera, plus two other men, used a solid bat to beat the girl behind the single-family home along Valley View Avenue. The men reportedly took turns whacking the 15-year-old girl’s flailing body — 28 swings in total. Her injuries included an “indented” buttocks, discolored arms and legs, and visible bleeding from the neck down.

A second unnamed source would later tell cops that Ayala-Rivera (‘Noctorno’) ordered the backyard clubbing because he felt the victim was “not doing a good job as an MS-13 prostitute.” The same source revealed Ayala-Rivera (‘Noctorno’) raked in a lot of money by trafficking teenage girls to men of all ages.

[…]According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Romero-Rivera is in the United States illegally.

Gang-raping little girls: (Washington Post)

The petite young woman was a 16-year-old Laurel High School student three years ago when she decided to skip classes one day to join two other girls at a party at a Hyattsville apartment.

At the party, she said, Oscar Ramos “Casper” Velasquez took her into a bedroom, where he kissed her and told her that if she didn’t have sex with him, as many as 15 other teenagers and young men at the gathering would have sex with her.

When she resisted, two more young men entered the room, the woman told jurors yesterday in federal court. One man threw her on the bed and choked her, the other held down her arms and “Oscar pulled out a gun,” she testified.

“He put it to my head, and he said if I didn’t shut up, he was going to kill me,” the woman told jurors.

Eight men raped her, the 19-year-old woman said. Two assaulted her simultaneously. Outside the room, she said, she heard one man say, “Five minutes each.”

Murdering little girls: (ABC News)

An MS-13 gang member has been convicted in the 2001 murder of a 13-year-old Whittier girl.

On June 28, 2001, the naked body of Jacqueline Piazza was found in Elysian Park. She had been shot twice in the head, a statement from the district attorney’s office said.

Her murder remained unsolved for nearly a decade, until the Los Angeles Police Department uncovered new information and presented it to the district attorney’s office, the statement said. Four men were charged in the crime in 2012.

Prosecutors said the men kidnapped the victim the night before she was found and drove her to a remote area of the park, where they allegedly sexually assaulted and killed her.

On Thursday, a jury found Jorge Palacios, 39, guilty of one count of first-degree murder and one count of kidnapping to commit rape.

Sex-trafficking little girls: (Washington Post)

The 12-year-old runaway was desperate — she was out of money and had no place to stay. So she turned to the one man her friends said could help: a top MS-13 gang member.

The day after they met at a party, the man drove the girl home, let her take a shower and gave her some fresh clothes. Then he told her, “We’re going to work.”

At first, the girl didn’t understand what the man meant. But everything became horribly clear after they pulled into a pharmacy parking lot and she watched another gang member return to the car with a box of condoms. The next stop was her first customer.

For three months, the girl was prostituted almost daily in dingy apartments, motels and even at an auto repair shop.

[…]The 12-year-old was one of dozens of prostitutes, many juveniles, being sold for sex in the Washington area by members of Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, the region’s largest and most dangerous street gang.

Lots more here.

Democrats and their mainstream media allies support sanctuary cities for MS-13. Anyone who disagrees is “Hitler”.

Watch Nancy Pelosi defend MS-13 in her own words:

Leftists are generous with other people’s money and other people’s lives. It’s not the rich Democrat elites and their rich allies in the mainstream media who suffer from MS-13. Nancy Pelosi has a net worth of nearly $30 million. The Democrat Party elites and the mainstream media talking heads live in gated communities, and have security systems and armed guards. They’re safe from MS-13. They little girls who run away from home don’t matter to them.

Polemics

How brief was the period in which the Cambrian phyla suddenly appeared?

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The Cambrian explosion refers to the sudden appearance of new body plans in the fossil record. ID proponents think that the period is between 5-10 million years at the most. Naturalists want to stretch out the period in which the body plans appear to tens of millions of years. The two sides can’t both be right. What’s the truth?

Evolution News has the answer.

Excerpt:

To establish the length of the most explosive period of innovation within the Cambrian explosion itself, Meyer cites the work of MIT geochronologist Samuel Bowring and his colleagues as well the work of another group led by Smithsonian paleontologist Douglas Erwin. The Bowring-led study showed that (in their words) “the main period of exponential diversification” within the Cambrian lasted “only 5-6 million years” (emphasis added). Meyer explains:

An analysis by MIT geochronologist Samuel Bowring has shown that the main pulse of Cambrian morphological innovation occurred in a sedimentary sequence spanning no more than 6 million years. Yet during this time representatives of at least sixteen completely novel phyla and about thirty classes first appeared in the rock record. In a more recent paper using a slightly different dating scheme, Douglas Erwin and colleagues similarly show that thirteen new phyla appear in a roughly 6-million-year window. (p. 73)

[…][T]ake a look first at the following figure that Bowring and his colleagues included in their definitive 1993 article, published in the journal Science. They use radiometric methods to date the different stages of the Cambrian period, including the crucial Tommotian and Atdabanian stages in which the greatest number of new animal phyla and classes arise. Note that the so-called Manykaian stage of the Cambrian period lasts about 10-14 million years. Note also that the main pulse of morphological innovation didn’t begin during this stage but rather during the Tommotian and Atdabanian — a period that they describe as taking between “5 to 10 million years,” and in a more detailed passage as taking about 5-6 million years.

[…]In the figure above, the Tommotian and Atdabanian stages of the Cambrian period together span only about 5 million years, starting at about 530 and ending about 525 million years ago. Bowring’s figure also depicts the total number of classes and orders present at any given time during the Cambrian period. The biggest increases in morphological innovation occur during the Tommotian and Atdabanian stages. Indeed, during this period the number of known orders nearly quadruples. Moreover, Bowring and his colleagues also make clear that this period corresponds to the main pulse of Cambrian morphological innovation as measured by the number of new phyla and classes that first appear. They note that, while a few groups of animals do arise in the earliest Manykaian stage of the Cambrian, the most rapid period of “exponential increase of diversification,” corresponding to the Tommotian and Atdabanian stages, “lasted only 5 to 6 m.y.”

You can see the figure they are reference in the Evolution News article.

Also, check out these clips that explain the Cambrian explosion:

Part 1:

Part 2:

The first clip features James Valentine, a professor of biology at the University of California who just co-authored a new book on the Cambrian explosion and is not a proponent of intelligent design.

The consensus among scientists regarding the period of time in which the new body plans appear is 5-6 million years. Biologically speaking, that’s a blink of an eye. You aren’t going that kind of complexity and innovation in such a short period of time any more than you can expect to win the lottery by buying 5-6 million tickets when the odds of winning are 1 in a googol (10 to the 100th power – 1, followed by 100 zeroes). You don’t have enough lottery tickets to make winning the lottery likely. Similarly, 5-6 million years is not enough time for naturalistic mechanisms to code brand new body plans from scratch. It would be like trying to research and write a Ph.D thesis during a single lunch hour. It’s just not enough time to produce the amount of information that’s required.