Videos

Frank Turek on the criterion of embarrassment

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Here’s the video. (H/T Chris S.)

The criterion of embarrassment is just one of the historical criteria used to select the parts of a piece of ancient literature that is likely to be historical. Other things in the source may have happened, but we can’t know them as history. If significant parts of a text are historical, it is possible to accept it as historical until there are specific reasons to say that some part of it is NOT historical.

Here is William Lane Craig’s list of criteria for a saying or event to be historical:

  1. Historical congruence: S fits in with known historical facts concerning the context in which S is said to have occurred.
  2. Independent, early attestation: S appears in multiple sources which are near to the time at which S is alleged to have occurred and which depend neither upon each other nor a common source.
  3. Embarrassment: S is awkward or counter-productive for the persons who serve as the source of information for S.
  4. Dissimilarity: S is unlike antecedent Jewish thought-forms and/or unlike subsequent Christian thought-forms.
  5. Semitisms: traces in the narrative of Aramaic or Hebrew linguistic forms.
  6. Coherence: S is consistent with already established facts about Jesus.

The criteria is the same for liberals and conservatives although some weight one criteria more than others. E.g. – moderate liberal E.P. Sanders likes embarrassment and multiple attestation, liberals John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg like multiple attestation and early attestation, moderate Dale Allison likes embarrassment and dissimilarity, conservative N.T. Wright likes dissimilarity. Craig likes all of them and uses them all.

If you want to see these criteria used in a debate, watch this debate between William Lane Craig and James Crossley.

This is the best debate on the historical Jesus that I have ever seen.

If someone is asking you whether they should accept the Bible in all by making a faith commitment, then you tell them about the historical criteria, and you show them a debate. Show them a list of sayings or events that are considered to be indisputable. (That list is by the naturalist E. P. Sanders). And show them a fact that even William Lane Craig hesitates to defend. That way, you are not asking them to swallow a camel of inerrancy before they can read the Bible. Give them the criteria and show them how to use it. Talk about the dating of the sources. Be a scholar. Let them read the text as an interested skeptic.

News

Rachel Maddow doesn’t understand modern military weapon systems

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Rachel Maddow doesn’t think that you can shoot down incoming missiles with missiles. I am NOT KIDDING.

Watch this if you like: (warning – has really vulgar language, because they are liberals)

Or read the transcript: (H/T Newsbusters)

STEVE MOORE, WALL STREET JOURNAL: The other tragedy, David, of what’s happened in the last 20 years is the reason Reykjavik fell apart was because Reagan didn’t want to give up SDI or Star Wars. And here we are, you know, what 20 years later and we still don’t have a missile defense system in this country.

DAVID STOCKMAN: We shouldn’t.

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC: They’ve never worked.

MOORE: I don’t want to get blown up.

MADDOW: You know what? Here’s the country, here’s the kind of thing you put over like a cake to protect the cake from flies. Missiles don’t work that way. That’s the whole idea of SDI. We’ll protect ourselves by shooting missiles at other missiles. It’s never worked in a test. We spent billions on it.

MOORE: It’s worked.

MADDOW: And anybody who understands this knows it can never work.

MOORE: If you don’t think it works, then why did the Russians not want us to do it?

MADDOW: The Russians were very happy to sign this thing.

MOORE: No they weren’t. They didn’t want us to do SDI because they knew they didn’t want us to blow up their missiles.

MADDOW: You know what? If you think you can shoot the bullet with the other bullet, you can have an awesome life in Annie Oakley’s side show, but you should not be in charge of billions of dollars of the defense budget. It’s such a hysterical fantasy. I love it.

Newsbusters writes:

It appears Maddow must have been out of the country during Desert Storm when Patriot missiles were used to take out Iraqi Scud missiles aimed at Israel and Saudi Arabia. Although their success rate was a great source of debate at the time (see the July 1996 Center for Defense Information study), no one disputes that some Scuds were indeed shot out of the air.

More importantly, at least twelve countries are currently using Patriot technology as part of their missile defense programs.

Even Japan has missile defense technology:

And India can do it, too.

You can shoot down incoming ballistic missiles from mobile launchers, fixed launchers and naval launchers. In fact, even fighters can intercept incoming ballistic missiles.

In military simulations, I’ve scrambled my F-14 Tomcat CAP to intercept vampires fired at my carrier battle group. (My CAP usually consists of 1 E-2C Hawkeye and 4 F-14D Tomcats because I really like the range on the AIM-54C Phoenix AAM).

Ships will regularly shoot down incoming SSMs. In fact, that is the whole point of the AEGIS missile defense system that is deployed on CG Ticonderoga and DDG Arleigh Burke vessels.

IN FACT, in simulations I have actually shot down vampires using this Phalanx close-in weapon system made by Raytheon. That thing is just a big machine gun used for point defense if all other missile defense systems fail.

Should we really have Democrats like Rachel Maddow in charge of national defense?

UPDATE: Here are a couple more examples I found:

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Mentoring

Book review of Stephen Hawking’s “The Grand Design” by Edgar Andrews

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First, who is Edgar Andrews?

Professor Edgar H. Andrews (BSc, PhD, DSc, FInstP, FIMMM, CEng, CPhys.) is Emeritus Professor of Materials at the University of London and an international expert on the science of large molecules. In 1967 he set up the Department of Materials at Queen Mary College, University of London, and served both as its Head and later as Dean of Engineering. He has published well over 100 scientific research papers and books, together with two Bible Commentaries and various works on science and religion and on theology. His book From Nothing to Nature has been translated into ten languages.

Edgar Andrews was an international consultant to the Dow Chemical Company (USA) for over thirty years and to the 3M Company (USA) for twenty years. He was a non-executive director of Denbyware PLC throughout the 1970s and for five years a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Neste Oy, the national oil company of Finland.

And now an excerpt from the book review: (H/T Apologetics 315)

Hawking and Mlodinow declare: ‘According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. They are a prediction of science’ (p.9).

So what is this magical M-theory? The authors are rather coy about it. ‘M-theory’, they say, ‘Is not a theory in the usual sense. It is a whole family of different theories, each of which is a good description of observations only in some range of physical situations’ (p.8). Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin is more explicit: ‘… we still do not know what M-theory is, or whether there is any theory deserving of the name’ (The trouble with physics, Allen Lane, 2007, p.146).

The fact is that M-theory is an untestable mathematical construction which many scientists believe has no bearing on physical reality. But that doesn’t deter our authors because they don’t believe in ‘objective reality’ anyway. What we think is ‘real’, they say, is simply a model assembled in our brains from raw data input by our senses. But, confusingly, the authors then claim that the best models are those that reflect the way things really do happen in the real world — appealing to the very objective reality they say does not exist! Confused? Me too.

But it gets worse. They claim that M-theory (whatever it might be) predicts not one universe but a multiverse — a vast collection of universes which cannot be observed or known to us in any way. On their own criterion, this makes M-theory a very bad model indeed. So it’s hardly a useful replacement for God.

Here’s a better book to read if you want to understand how belief in God relates to experimental science.

My Dad just finished reading his book “Who Made God?” and called me up to tell me how much he liked the book. My Dad is not a scientist, yet he read the whole thing and learned a lot about science. This is the book for people who haven’t read a thing about science and religion. It’s easy to understand because he explains the same thing over and other giving more and more detail. Even a child can understand the first explanation, and then he keeps layering on details until he gets up to the state-of-the-art.

Remember Brian Auten of Apologetics 315 picked this book as his favorite of 2010. You can’t go wrong!

My Dad is now reading my copy of “Is God Just a Human Invention?” by Jonathan Morrow and Sean McDowell. I’m working on “Is God a Moral Monster?” by Paul Copan. I like books where difficult questions are asked and then careful answers are given. Then when people ask me the same questions, I can answer them using what I’ve learned – and often phrase the question even more clearly and forcefully than they did when they asked me.