All posts by Wintery Knight

https://winteryknight.com/
Polemics

Choosing my religion: why I am not a Muslim

8 Comments

I’ve decided to spend some time writing extremely short explanations about why I am an evangelical Protestant Christian instead of anything else.

I have two aims.

First, I want show how an honest person can evaluate rival religions using the laws of logic, scientific evidence and historical evidence. Second, I want people who are not religious to understand that religions are either true or it is false. Religions should not be chosen based where you were born, what your parents believed, or what resonates with you. A religion should be embraced for the same reason as the theory of gravity is embraced: because it reflects the way the world really is.

Why I am not a Muslim

  1. To be a Muslim, you must believe that the Koran is without error.
  2. The Koran claims that Jesus did not die on a cross. (Qur’an, 4: 157-158)
  3. The crucifixion of Jesus is virtually undisputed among non-Muslim historians, including atheist historians.
  4. Therefore, it is not rational for me to become a Muslim.

The data

Consider some quotes from the (mostly) non-Christian scholars below:

“Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.” Gert Lüdemann

“That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.”  J.D. Crossan

“The passion of Jesus is part of history.” Geza Vermes

Jesus’ death by crucifixion is “historically certain”. Pinchas Lapide

“The single most solid fact about Jesus’ life is his death: he was executed by the Roman prefect Pilate, on or around Passover, in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists, namely, crucifixion.” Paula Fredriksen

“The support for the mode of his death, its agents, and perhaps its co-agents, is overwhelming: Jesus faced a trial before his death, was condemned, and was executed by crucifixion.” L.T. Johnson

“One of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the Roman prefect of Judea, Ponitus Pilate.” Bart Ehrman

That’s 7 famous historians: 3 atheists, 3 Jews and 1 moderate Catholic. Ludemann, Crossan and Ehrman have all debated against the resurrection of Jesus with William Lane Craig. The Koran was written in the 7th century. That is why no professional historian accepts the Koran as more authoritative than the many earlier Christian and non-Christian sources for the crucifixion story. Many of the sources for the crucifixion are dated to the 1st century.

So that’s one reason why I am not a Muslim.

Commentary

The etiquette czar’s rules for patriotic protest

1 Comment

Michelle Malkin’s latest column is a must-read.

Michelle has had it with the left’s double-standard on questioning government.

Here’s a tip from the Democrats for those who disagree with their socialist plans:

No shouting. Congressional representatives cannot sell Obamacare with mobs of unruly senior citizens and small business owners interrupting to press them on specific sections of the bill. Limit your objections to a library whisper (30dB or less) and only challenge your lawmakers with hushed, dulcet tones. Otherwise, you will scare them and they will be forced to hide behind teleconference calls, sick children at hospitals, or union bosses.

If, on the other hand, you are attending a presidential town hall to show your affection and approbation, “spirited” chanting is acceptable.

Don’t: “HANDS OFF HEALTH CARE!” and “READ THE BILL!”

Do: “I LOVE YOU, BARACK!” “AMEN!” and “YES WE CAN!”

And one more:

No Nazi comparisons. References to fascism are ugly and un-American. Swastikas have no place in debates about nationalizing 20 percent of the economy. Swastikas may, however, still be used as substitutes for the “S” in “BusHitler” and tattoos on the forehead of Darth Cheney.

This is the left. They don’t like to be opposed, and they are willing to exercise power to stifle dissent – just the opposite of what Bush did when he faced much stiffer opposition during his 8 years. This suppression of free speech and free debate is exactly what goes on on university campuses today. The left is not about using reason and evidence to settle disagreements. They want to crush dissent by using government power.

We need to be really clear about this. When the government takes control of any part of the private economy, it is socialism. When the individual earns less money because of high taxes, and is legally obligated to buy goods and services from one service provider, (the government), then he has lost his liberty. That is fascism. Democrat policies lead to socialism, and socialism leads to fascism.

Commentary

How do we know that some parts of DNA really are non-functional?

Leave a comment

ECM sent me this post from Uncommon Descent about DNA and software design.

Perhaps I should begin by explaining explaining how software is made. The customer gives you a list of use case, which are descriptions of things that you expect the finished software to do. This list of expected system behaviors is called the “functional requirements”. There are also “non-functional requirements” that the user will not see, such as how easily the components of the system can be maintained or tested.

Now consider the post by William Dembski. He writes:

One of the main arguments to support evolution appeals to shared non-functional structures between organisms. Since design entails design for function, shared non-functional structures would suggest common ancestry in the absence of common design. But how can we tell whether something is truly non-functional?

Then he cites an e-mail sent to him by a software engineer, who explains how a lot of code is included to address exception handling and non-functional concerns.

As a programmer, sometimes I spend a lot of time designing error-detection and/or error-correction algorithms (especially for dealing with user input). Some of these functions may never, ever be used in a real-life situation. There are also various subroutines and functions that provide either exotic or minor capabilities that, likewise, maybe be used very seldom if at all. But they are there for a reason. Good programming practice requires considerable extra design and implementation of features that may only rarely, if ever, be used.

If someone were to cut out and eliminate these sections of code, repairing what’s left so that the program still functions, the program may work perfectly well for just about all situations. But there are some situations that, without the snipped code, would create havoc if the program tried to call on a function that was no longer there or that was replaced by some different function that tried to take its place. (Ask yourself what percent of the functionality of your spreadsheet or word processor program you use, and then ask if you would even notice if some of the lesser-known functionality were removed.)

I think biological life is like that. It seems to me that if some DNA code can be successfully removed with no apparent effects, one possibility is that the removed portion is rarely used, or the impact of it not being there has effects that are masked or otherwise hidden.

Perhaps redundancy is what was removed, meaning the organism will now not be quite as robust in all situations as before. I can give a kidney to someone else and suffer no ill effect whatsoever… until my remaining kidney fails and cannot be helped by the redundant one that I gave up (which situation may never, ever really occur due to my general good health).

P.S. Being able to snip something with no apparent ill effect may in fact provide support for ID by showing that the system was so well engineered that it could automatically adjust to a certain degree, and in most cases completely (apparently). It would be interesting to see some ID research into some of the evo cases that are being used to support the various flavors of junk DNA, to see what REALLY happens long term with the new variety now missing something snipped.

Sometimes, I forget that most of the world is trying to assess where biological systems are designed without knowing what engineers know about how the process of engineering.

Consider the example of implementing caching in order to reduce the frequency of network and database calls. Making a call to a remote system over a network can be very slow if there is lot of traffic congestion. The same thing applies to reading from a database or the file system. Engineers have invented a solution to this problem called “caching”. This basically means keeping the data you use the most often, or the most recently, in memory. It helps you to avoid looking up the same data over and over.

Notice that caching doesn’t do anything for the functional requirements. Instead, engineers are writing a whole bunch of code to address a non-functional requirement: performance. That caching code still has to be designed, written and tested, but the user will never see it produce any external behavior. In fact, the user will not be aware of the caching module at all!