Tag Archives: Atheism

Podcasts

Jim Wallace reports on his mission trip to UC Berkeley

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Jim Wallace at Please Convince Me has a new podcast up. This is worth listening to if you want to understand atheists.

The MP3 file is here. (75 minutes, 34 Mb)

Normally, I would write a summary of this, but suffice to say that he goes over the thoughts of a few prominent atheists, and what is valuable is that you can see what they think of Christians, and what they really believe. I always enjoy finding out what atheists believe and then taking a look at how well they can ground their “values” based on their view of an accidental, materialist universe.

UPDATE: I just got this in the mail from Jim’s mailing list.

Hello

What a great February! We just got back from a wonderful trip to Berkeley with 30 high school students who spent time studying atheism and philosophical naturalism and talking to students on the campus about the existence of God. It was part of our annual Berkeley Missions Trip and it resulted in 30 young warriors who are now equipped to defend their faith and change their world. We want to help you do the same thing, so here is this month’s “Three Minute Truth Training” responding to yet another objection to the truth of the Christian Worldview:

OBJECTION: Christians believe Christianity is true simply because they were raised in a Christian culture. If they were raised in a Muslim culture, they would believe that Islam is true with the same passion and certainty.

RESPONSE: The answer to this objection lies in Christian history. While it is true that cultural and geographic influences often favor a particular point of view or behavior, our personal experience demonstrates that individuals often make private, independent choices in spite of the accepted beliefs of their culture. As an example, many of us are vegetarians in spite of the fact the culture is predominantly carnivorous. The history of Christianity also confirms that the vast majority of Christian converts concluded that Christianity was true in spite of their geographic location or cultural background. You can demonstrate this by helping the skeptic recognize the facts of history:

The History of the Ancient World
Christianity emerged in a culture that was largely Jewish or Pagan (a polytheistic mix of religious beliefs within the Roman Empire) and completely hostile to the claims of Christianity. History records the hardship that was faced by 1st Century Christians who concluded that Christianity was true and devoted their lives to Jesus. These believers did not become Christians because Christianity was the default religion of the time.

The History of China
China also has a history of religious suppression related to Christianity. The native culture of China has historically embraced some version of Shenism or Taoism. While Christian missionaries labored in China for centuries, their efforts were often suppressed by governmental regimes (like the Communist Party of China). In spite of this suppression and the cultural inclination toward Shenism or Taoism, Christianity has continued to grow as a underground movement, with some reporting as many as 130 million Christians now living in China. These believers did not become Christians because Christianity was the default religion of their region or culture.

The History of Persecution
History has demonstrated the fact that Christianity continues to grow in spite of intense persecution. Christians have historically come to faith in regions where Christianity is NOT the default religion. For this reason, Christians are still the most persecuted religious group in the world, particularly in places like North Korea, Muslim countries, India, China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. These suffering believers did not become Christians because Christianity was the default religion of their region or culture.

The History of Many of Us Here In America
While America is clearly a Christian nation, our principles of freedom have allowed our citizens to embrace a number of competing religious worldviews without restriction. In fact, a recent Pew Forum poll revealed that Muslims and those who do not affiliate themselves with any religious belief system are the two fastest growing groups in America. Many Christians have come to faith in homes that were hostile or benign to theistic beliefs. In spite of their familial “micro-culture”, they converted to Christianity. These believers did not become Christians because Christianity was the default religion of their family.

Millions of Christians have historically demonstrated that they embrace the truth of the Christian worldview because they believe it is true, not because it happens to be the default position of their family, culture, region or era in history.

Polemics

Is Skeptic magazine keeping up with the progress of science?

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Not if the progress of science undermines the speculations about a naturalistic origin of life. In their latest issue, Skeptic magazine espouses the old, discredited Miller-Urey experiments from half a century ago. The old science is Darwin-friendly. But is that old science still current?

Consider this post from Evolution News.

Excerpt:

Stanley Miller had not in fact “simulated atmospheric conditions on the early Earth.” And this has been known for quite a long time. Origin of life theorist David Deamer states:

This optimistic picture began to change in the late 1970s, when it became increasingly clear that the early atmosphere was probably volcanic in origin and composition, composed largely of carbon dioxide and nitrogen rather than the mixture of reducing gases assumed by the Miller-Urey model. Carbon dioxide does not support the rich array of synthetic pathways leading to possible monomers . . . .

(D.W. Deamer, “The First Living Systems: a Bioenergetic Perspective,” Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, Vol. 61: 239 (1997).

As I discuss here, there’s very good reason to understand why an atmosphere on Earth of volcanic origin would not contain methane or ammonia. A 2010 paper in Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology states that the chemical properties of the Earth’s mantle have not changed over time, and thus if volcanoes don’t produce appreciable amounts methane and ammonia today (which they don’t), then they also wouldn’t back then:

Geochemical evidence in Earth’s oldest igneous rocks indicates that the redox state of the Earth’s mantle has not changed over the past 3.8 Gyr (Delano 2001; Canil 2002).(Kevin Zahnle, Laura Schaefer, and Bruce Fegley, “Earth’s Earliest Atmospheres,” Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology (2010).)

The papers cited in the quote above confirm this point. For example, Canil’s 2002 paper in Earth and Planetary Science Letters found that vanadium redox states in peridotite-bearing mantle xenoliths and Archean cratons imply that Earth’s mantle was just as oxidized in the Archean as it is today. The paper concludes:

Abiotic synthesis of molecules and hydrocarbons that can lead to life in early Archean mantle-derived volcanic gases requires they contain significant H2 and CO, but such reduced components are not supported by results of this and many other studies, which imply a scenario of Archean mantle redox not unlike that of today. Life may have found its origins in other environments or by other mechanisms.

(Dante Canil, “Vanadian in peridotites, mantle redox and tectonic environments: Archean to present,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Vol. 195:75-90 (2002) (internal citation removed).)

The situation is summed by authorities Kasting and Catling as follows: “For the 4 billion years for which a geological record exists, no evidence for a pronounced change in mantle redox state exists.” (James F. Kasting and David Catling, “Evolution of a Habitable Planet,” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Vol. 41:429-463 (2003).)

Skeptic magazine cannot be skeptical on the origin of life. They have to affirm a naturalistic origin of life, because they assume that there was no intelligent cause of the origin of life, before looking at the evidence. They affirm that the universe is eternal, before looking at the evidence. They affirm that there is a multiverse to explain the fine-tuning, before looking at the evidence. They affirm that habitable planets are common, before looking at the evidence. They assume that a gradual string of pre-Cambrian fossils exists, before looking at the evidence. They believe in man-made catastrophic global warming alarmism, before looking at the evidence. Evidence is very, very bad for skeptics. Which is why they oppose the progress of science and have to go back fifty years to the speculations. They don’t like the progress of science. They believe what they want to believe. And that’s why they don’t want to debate anything, but instead refuse to hire people who disagree with them – or fire them if they are already hired.

It’s Skeptic magazine versus the scientists. Religion versus science. The pre-supposition of naturalism versus reality.

News

Obama administration rolls back conscience protections for health care workers

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From Life Site News.

Excerpt:

The Obama Administration has rescinded a federal regulation from 2008 that protected the conscience rights of health care providers opposed to providing abortifacient contraception, such as the Plan-B “morning-after” pill.

The Health and Human Services Department under Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, issued the new “final rule,” which leaves health-care workers of federally funded entities a narrower conscience exemption that only protects them from having to participate in abortions or sterilizations.

The new regulation replaces the earlier one enacted in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration, which broadened the interpretation of existing federal conscience statutes related to abortion to include health professionals opposed to emergency contraception, such as Ella or Plan-B, drugs which pro-life advocates say also act as abortifacients.

Sebelius alleged in the promulgation of the new final rule that the Bush-era conscience regulations “instead led to greater confusion”, citing comments received by HHS. She said her department was changing the rule because it was “unclear and potentially over-broad in scope.”

The HHS Secretary said in her statement that her department did share the concern of those in favor of rescinding the rule that it had the “potential to negatively impact patient access to contraception and certain other medical services” esp. for certain sub-populations, such as “low income patients, minorities, the uninsured, patients in rural areas, Medicaid beneficiaries, or other medically under-served populations.”

The ruling is a victory for Planned Parenthood and other “family planning” groups that have insisted that drugs like Plan-B (taken within 72 hours of sexual intercourse) and Ella (taken within five-days of intercourse) should be defined as “contraception.” Pro-life groups countered that pro-life health providers should be protected from discrimination under federal statutes, because these drugs could prevent a conceived human embryo from implanting in the mother’s womb, thereby aborting it.

[…]“Today’s erosion of conscience protections for medical professionals is a blow both to medicine and the right to practice one’s deeply-held convictions,” said Dr. J. Scott Ries, on behalf of the 16,000-member Christian Medical Association (CMA).

Ries said the new HHS final rule disregarded the findings of the previous HHS 2008 final rule which stated that allowing health professionals to practice according to their convictions would negatively impact patient services or create “new barriers.”

“Losing conscientious healthcare professionals and faith-based institutions to discrimination and job loss especially imperils the poor and patients in medically underserved areas,” said Ries. “We are already facing critical shortages of primary care physicians, and the Obama administration’s decision now threatens to make the situation far worse for patients across the country who depend on faith-based health care.”

As the days go on, I find myself missing George W. Bush more and more. Say what you like about him, he was a Christian. And now we have a non-Christian (atheist) president and an atheistic administration. Things like conscience protections are naturally under attack. Naturally, people on the secular left think that the state has a right to impose their views and overrule the religious and moral views of individual citizens. That’s what fascism is – and fascism is exclusively a phenomenon of the political left. The right values individual liberty and free market capitalism.