BeThinking posted a new lecture featuring Dr. Simon Gathercole.
Here’s the speaker bio:
Dr Simon Gathercole is Senior Lecturer in New Testament Studies and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, at the University of Cambridge. He is particularly fascinated by the connections between the New Testament and its contemporary literature.
Summary:
Simon Gathercole shows how the geographical information in the New Testament Gospels demonstrates their historical reliability and their basis in eyewitness sources. The illustrated lecture lasts about 60 minutes and is followed by about 20 minutes of Q&A.
BeThinking has a PDF containing all the slides used in the lecture.
The lecture is here:
Topics:
Detailed geography is difficult to fake, especially when it is far into the past
Bible authors would have to rely on eyewitness testimony if they wanted to get geographic details right
You can even cross-reference the geographic details mentioned in the New Testament with extra-Biblical sources of that time
Cities mentioned in the Bible are mentioned in other sources
Locations that are mentioned in Josephus, a Jewish historian
Locations that are mentioned in the Rabbis
22 of 27 places mentioned in the gospels are attested
If you compare the gospels with Josephus they are as good
Example slide – he shows where these cities in orange are mentioned outside the Bible:
At the end of the lecture 22 out of 27 cities are attested in other sources
This lecture caught my eye because it was all about connecting the Bible to evidence outside the Bible. I like evidence. You should give it a listen.
Pastor Matt posted about something that I think all Christian apologists believe, deep down. (H/T The Poached Egg)
He writes:
Typically, the church has defined loving one’s neighbor as in line with Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) and Christ’s teaching in passages such as Matthew 25:31-46, in which we are commanded to love the imprisoned, the homeless, the hungry, etc. as if they were Jesus himself. Of course all believers should do so whether by volunteering at a soup kitchen or donating money to ministries like World Help.
But there is more to loving one’s neighbor these days than caring for the poor, as important as that is. Those of us who live in a first world western country now dwell in a post-Christian society. Our neighbors are inundated with naturalism masquerading as good science and sound philosophy. Non-Christians believe the faith is intellectually vacuous.
It shocks many people when those trained in apologetics point out that atheists cannot answer questions like, “How did the universe come into existence?” “Why is our planet so finely tuned for life despite all the odds against it?” “How did life begin?” “Why do humans have consciousness?” “How is there truth or right and wrong without God?” “Why did the disciples die horrible deaths as impoverished traveling peasants rather than deny the resurrection of Jesus?”, etc.
If we are to help bring our neighbors to saving faith, we must first destroy their false ideas of what Christianity is and is not. That means we must preach the Gospel (2 Cor. 5:21), knock down specious views of the faith and present the truth of what we believe.
Apologetics is not just an intellectual exercise for nerds like me or a debate to be won on college campuses but an increasing tool in loving our neighbors. For if they do not understand the faith, they will likely not come to faith and that is what the God we love wants and how we must show love to our neighbors. So, let’s study not just to win arguments but to love others.
That reminds me of 2 Corinthians 10:3-5. Our job is to beat up on false ideas and speculations.
Pastor Matt’s point is critical, I think. Just stop and think for a minute about your non-believing co-workers. Do they know that the universe began to exist? Do they know that the initial conditions and the cosmological constants have to be finely tuned to support things like galaxies, stars, planets and elements heavier than hydrogen? Do they know how much information is in a protein, and how many proteins would be needed to make the first living cell? Do they know what it takes to make a planet that can support life? What facts from the gospels and the Pauline letters pass the tests for historicity? What is the best explanation of those minimal facts?
These are the facts that we share when we discuss spiritual things with people. They are not Christian facts, they are public, testable facts. And yet, almost no one in the culture who is not already a believer is curious to find out these things on their own. But without the evidence, how are they supposed to take the first step towards a relationship with God through Jesus Christ? It’s not possible. This is a propositional faith, and we know it’s true by evidence. To share the evidence with someone so they can decide is as loving as sharing the evidence about retirement planning, or the evidence about nutrition, or the evidence about fitness and exercise, or the evidence about career planning. When you love someone, you tell them the facts, and then they decide. Evangelism is the same thing.
Here’s something from a recent post by J. Warner Wallace, where he talks about doing apologetics with people who have not yet decided whether God exists or not.
The Undecided
In many ways, this group holds the most promise. People who are undecided usually fall into two categories. Some have never really given the issue much thought. They’re neither for nor against; they’ve simply been living unaware. You may be the first person to introduce them to the issues you are trying to share. If so, remember the importance of a first impression. What you say or do will have an impact on the work of those who follow you. The second group of “undecideds” are people who have given the issue some thought, but are just beginning to make their decision. For this group of people, your defense of Christianity may very well be the deciding factor. The responsibility you and I have with the undecided is daunting, but it’s a privilege to play a small part in their decision.
OK, so I want to make a point about this. So often, I see Christian parents and leaders trying to focus on changing people’s behaviors, and not by giving them evidence. Instead of trying to convince them about what’s true, they tell them Bible verses, or maybe tell them they are going to Hell. But given what Matt and J. Warner said, I don’t want us to be focused on changing outward behavior. I want us to be focused on showing people what is true and showing our work – how we arrived at these true beliefs. You are doing Christianity wrong if you focus on getting behaviors from people by shaming them, overpowering them or scaring them.
So in my case, I’m not trying to get non-Christians to act like Christians when they have no reasons to be one. I’m trying to get them to settle on true beliefs – so that each of them and God can shake hands and be reconciled, responding to his drawing them of their own free will. Then, they can decide how they are going to act. And how they act might be even better than what we had in mind for them when all we wanted was for them to quit swearing and eat their vegetables. The Christian life is bigger than just making people do what we want them to do.
This lecture is 29 minutes long, the Q&A is 15 minutes. I highly recommend this lecture to all audiences of all levels of ability, for the simple reasons that apart from the content, this lecture is a how-to clinic in the tone, body language, slides and so on for you to use when trying to be persuasive when making your case. Science is king in this lecture. The scientific method is defined and applied in a winsome way. Making science understandable should be the bread and butter approach to Christian apologetics, and this lecture rivals the Mike Strauss lecture at Stanford University and the Mike Strauss lecture at the University of Texas – Dallas as the ideal lectures for showing that. It’s not just the scientific material that makes this lecture by Collins work, it’s the narrative and the style that make the lecture work.
Robin Collins (PhD, University of Notre Dame, 1993), is professor of philosophy at Messiah College, Grantham, PA specializing in the area of science and religion. He has written over twenty-five articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, such as the fine-tuning of the cosmos as evidence for the existence of God, evolution and original sin, the Doctrine of Atonement, Asian religions and Christianity, and Bohm’s theory of quantum mechanics. Some of his most recent articles/book chapters are “Philosophy of Science and Religion” in The Oxford Handbook of Science and Religion, “Divine Action and Evolution” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (2009) “The Multiverse Hypothesis: A Theistic Perspective,” in Universe or Multiverse? (Cambridge University Press), and “God and the Laws of Nature,” in Theism or Naturalism: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He recently received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to finish a book that presents the case for design based on physics and cosmology, tentatively entitled The Well-Tempered Universe: God, Cosmic Fine-tuning, and the Laws of Nature.
His thesis in one slide:
Fine-tuning for discoverability – the DLO thesis
Summary:
Thesis: the universe is more intelligible than we would expect it by chance
The regular fine-tuning argument says that complex embodied observers are very rare
But the number of highly-discoverable universes that have complex embodied observers is rarer still
Why do we exist in a highly-discoverable universe?
Can we quantify and test discoverability?
Yes: by varying fundamental parameters and seeing how it affects discoverability
Conclusion of his calculations: The Discoverability-Liveability Optimality range is an even smaller range within the Liveablity Optimality range of the standard fine-tuning argument
Fine-tuning #1: the fine structure constant, governs the strength of the electro-magnetic force
If larger, wood-burning fire becomes impossible because fires won’t stay lit, and therefore forging metals becomes unlikely
If smaller, wood-burning fires won’t go out, e.g. – from lightning strikes, so that wood would be less accessible
Other constraints: smaller value decreases effectiveness of light microscopes, drastically lowers efficiency of transformers and motors
Fine-tuning #2: the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR), radiation left over from the Big Bang
humans need to discover the CMBR in order to confirm the Big Bang creation out of nothing, and it depends on baryon/pothon ratio
his calculations show that the actual value of CMBR is exactly at the peak for detectability by humans
if baryon/photon ratio larger, CMBR is less discoverable
if baryon/photon ratio smaller, CMBR is less discoverable
Fine-tuning #3: parameters related to subatomic particles are fine-tuned for their discovery and usefulness, e.g. – the bottom quark, the charm quark, the tau lepton and the Higgs Boson
the lifetime of the particles affects their usefulness to scientists who want to investigate the Standard Model of physics
decay rates of these subatomic particles are related to several of the finely-tuned parameters
for example, the mass of the bottom quark is finely-tuned for its discoverability by scientists
the tau lepton and the charm quark are similarly fine-tuned for disoverability
the mass of the Higgs boson is finely-tuned for discoverability and for making further discoveries
Conclusion: the DLO thesis is strongly confirmed – this is an even greater degree of fine-tuning that the already astonishing probabilities of the fine-tuning for complex, embodied intelligent beings
The formalized version of the philosophical argument based on this evidence is impervious with some of the traditional objections to the standard fine-tuning argument
#1 multiverse/selection effect: it is not subject to multiverse / observer selection objections
#2 normalizeability: it is not subject to the McGrew-Vestrup objection because the range of possible values is finite not infinite
#3 falsifiability: it makes falsifiable predictions, and in fact Collins’ earlier calculations of the CMBR discoverability contained an error that falsified the thesis – until he found the error and corrected for it
#4 usefulness: it gives clues about the Creator’s purpose for us, namely that the universe was created for us to be able to do science and find evidence of the Creator’s existence – there is no expectation for us to exercise blind faith, trust in God is meant to be a plausible deduction from the progress of experimental science
Sample slide:
Bottom quark lifetime is finely-tuned for discoverability
And another:
Higgs boson mass is finely-tuned for discoverability
Earlier, I blogged about a Robin Collins lecture on the fine-tuning that allows complex, embodied life to exist. Another must-see lecture. If you are looking for something to study in university, and you have funding, then physics, mathematics and philosophy are the best places to be for a Christian scholar.
