News

The kalam cosmological argument explained in a 4-minute video

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Here’s the 4-minute video that I would like everyone to tweet and share on Facebook:

It does go over the scientific evidence that has emerged recently that caused scientists to accept the beginning of the universe.

Here’s a re-cap of the three main evidences for the Big Bang cosmology from Caltech.

Excerpt:

What is the Big Bang?

According to the big bang theory, the universe began by expanding from an infinitesimal volume with extremely high density and temperature. The universe was initially significantly smaller than even a pore on your skin. With the big bang, the fabric of space itself began expanding like the surface of an inflating balloon – matter simply rode along the stretching space like dust on the balloon’s surface. The big bang is not like an explosion of matter in otherwise empty space; rather, space itself began with the big bang and carried matter with it as it expanded. Physicists think that even time began with the big bang. Today, just about every scientist believes in the big bang model. The evidence is overwhelming enough that in 1951, the Catholic Church officially pronounced the big bang model to be in accordance with the Bible.

Until the early 1900s, most people had assumed that the universe was fixed in size. New possibilities opened up in 1915, when Einstein formulated his famous general relativity theorythat describes the nature of space, time, and gravity. This theory allows for expansion or contraction of the fabric of space. In 1917, astronomer Willem de Sitter applied this theory to the entire universe and boldly went on to show that the universe could be expanding. Aleksandr Friedmann, a mathematician, reached the same conclusion in a more general way in 1922, as did Georges Lemaître, a cosmologist and a Jesuit, in 1927. This step was revolutionary since the accepted view at the time was that the universe was static in size. Tracing back this expanding universe, Lemaître imagined all matter initially contained in a tiny universe and then exploding. These thoughts introduced amazing new possibilities for the universe, but were independent of observation at that time.

Why Do We Think the Big Bang Happened?

Three main observational results over the past century led astronomers to become certain that the universe began with the big bang. First, they found out that the universe is expanding—meaning that the separations between galaxies are becoming larger and larger. This led them to deduce that everything used to be extremely close together before some kind of explosion. Second, the big bang perfectly explains the abundance of helium and other nuclei like deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) in the universe. A hot, dense, and expanding environment at the beginning could produce these nuclei in the abundance we observe today. Third, astronomers could actually observe the cosmic background radiation—the afterglow of the explosion—from every direction in the universe. This last evidence so conclusively confirmed the theory of the universe’s beginning that Stephen Hawking said, “It is the discovery of the century, if not of all time.”

The article goes into detail about each of these three evidences.

The Big Bang is not compatible with atheism

According to the Secular Humanist Manifesto, atheism is committed to an eternally existing universe, (See the first item: “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.”). If something non-material brought all existing matter into being, that would be a supernatural cause, and atheists deny that anything supernatural exists. The standard Big Bang theory requires that all the matter in the universe come into being out of nothing. This falsifies eternal models of the universe, which are required by atheist Scriptures.

This is a bad time to be an atheist, given the state of science. It was easier to be an atheist before we made these scientific discoveries, but given the progress of science it’s not rational to be an atheist anymore.

 

 

News

New study: college women binge drinking more often than college men

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Here’s an article about a recent Harvard study in U.S. News and World Report.

Excerpt:

Female college students exceed government-suggested limits on weekly alcohol consumption more often than male students do, according to a new report by researchers at Harvard University.

Men and women are starting on something of an uneven playing field. In 1990, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a division of the National Institutes of Health, suggested that men drink a maximum of four drinks daily and 14 drinks weekly. The guidelines for women suggest that they max out at three drinks a day and seven drinks a week.

“Recommended drinking limits are lower for women than for men because research to date has found that women experience alcohol-related problems at lower levels of alcohol consumption than men,” says Bettina Hoeppner, a Harvard Medical School professor and coauthor of the study, published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research Friday.

[…]”With women’s greater tendency to exceed weekly guidelines than men, there may be long-term implications for women in particular,” the study suggests. “Women are at a greater risk than men of engaging in drinking habits during college that are more likely to result in long-term harm.”

Hoeppner says that the weekly limits are designed to prevent future health problems due to excessive drinking, such as liver disease and breast cancer. Of students who had had at least one drink during the first year, 60 percent of men and 64 percent of women reported exceeding the weekly guidelines at least once.

Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control warned about the increasing number of women and girls who binge drink and said that it’s an “under-recognized problem.”

“It is alarming to see that binge drinking is so common among women and girls, and that women and girls are drinking so much when they do,” Robert Brewer, head of the CDC’s alcohol program, said in a statement.

The College Fix wrote about this article, and noted that the response from feminist blogs like Jezebel were dismissive.

Excerpt:

Reaction to the piece has emerged via a write up on the feminism website Jezebel that defended the girls’ decision to join, saying sororities “suck,” and that ”equal opportunity for women to succeed means equal opportunities to act like liver-shredding idiots.”

Jezebel writer Erin Gloria Ryan goes on to claim these girls are content with their decisions:

“When college women are free to do what they want, some of them are going to want to behave like college jackasses. They’re going to drink, swear, hook up sloppily and indiscriminately, barf in the streets, and generally act like boorish male characters in straight-to-DVD sex comedies. Oh, and one more thing: despite what an entire subgenre of concernmongering Little Girls Lost trend pieces on the phenomenon might have you think, they’re perfectly happy.”

Everything is going according to plan here, if you ask the feminists. In fact, this was their goal: equality.

What do you think is causing women to binge drink more than men? Is it some external force or is it something inside them that is driving it? When I talk to college-aged women about this, they usually don’t have a good answer for why they are doing it except because their friends are, and they feel obligated to participate.

In a previous post, I wrote about a study from the Institute of American Values that found that one of the reasons why women binge drink so much is to make them feel less responsible for hooking up with anonymous men at parties. After all, they reason, if they choose to drink themselves into a stupor then they aren’t responsible for what happens next. They can have stories to tell people about the superhot guys they hooked up with, but without feeling guilty about anything.

Podcasts

William Lane Craig lectures on failure in the Christian life

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I found this audio on Brian Auten’s Apologetics 315 web site.

Here is the MP3 file.

And here is my summary.

Intro:

  • the topic of failure is not one that is often discussed by Christians
  • failure #1: failure in the Christian life which is the result of sin
  • failure #2: when a Christian is defeated while trying to serve God
  • the consequences for failure #1 can be worse for the Christian
  • the consequences for failure #2 can be worse for the world as whole
  • how is it possible for a person to fail when they are obeying God? (#2)
  • how can it be that God can call someone to a task then let them fail?
  • failure is not persecution – persecution is normal for Christians
  • failure is not trials – testing is normal for Christians to grow

Bill’s failure:

  • Bill had submitted all the coursework for his second doctoral degree
  • but he had to pass a comprehensive oral examination
  • he failed to pass the comprehensive exam
  • Bill and Jan and his supporters had all prayed for him to pass
  • how could God allow this to happen?

Solution to the problem:

  • God’s will for us may be that we fail at the things we try in life
  • there are things that God may teach us through failure
  • Bill learned that human relationships are more important than careers
  • we need to realize that “success” in life is not worldly success
  • true success is getting to know God well during your life
  • and failure may be the best way to get to know God well
  • it may even be possible to fail to know God while achieving a lot
  • the real measure of a man is loving God and loving your fellow man

Practical:

  • give thanks to God regardless of your circumstances
  • try to learn from your failure
  • never give up

The ending of Bill’s story:

  • Bill spent an entire year preparing for a re-take of his exam
  • Bill was awarded his second doctorate “magna cum laude” (with great distinction)
  • Bill learned that American students are not well prepared for exams
  • the year of studying remedied his inadequate American education
  • in retrospect, he is thankful for the failure – he learned more

If you like this, you should pick up Craig’s book “Hard Questions, Real Answers“, which has a chapter on this problem. And here is a similar lecture that Dr. Craig gave at his home church in Atlanta on the same topic. I’m not posting this because I’ve had a catastrophic failure or anything. But I think in this economy, I am seeing a lot of my plans dashed and I am being forced to circle the wagons a little and take fewer risks. I am being forced to aim for smaller goals, and plan for future difficulties. It does bother me that I can’t comfortably take risks to achieve the best goals that I want to achieve. But I have to play the hand I’m dealt, and do what looks doable right now. Some of my friends are having the same problem of having to recalculate what is probable and what is possible.