Tag Archives: Atheism

News

The Cambrian explosion is getting more explosive

7 Comments

A story on the Cambrian explosion from the radically pro-evolution BBC. (H/T Evolution News)

Excerpt:

In a new study, Canadian researchers identified a previously unclassifiable fossil that was long believed to belong perhaps to the shrimp family.

They called it Nectocaris pteryx – a small soft-bodied cephalopod with two tentacles rather than the eight or 10 seen in today’s octopuses.

The new survey’s results were presented in the journal Nature.

The findings make the ancestors of modern squid and octopuses at least 30 million years older.

Evolutionary biologist Martin Smith, the main author of the study, told PA news agency that the findings bring cephalopods much closer to the first appearance of complex animals.

“We go from very simple pre-Cambrian life-forms to something as complex as a cephalopod in the geological blink of an eye, which illustrates just how quickly evolution can produce complexity,” said Mr Smith.

Yes, isn’t it amazing how naturalistic mechanisms like “evolution” can create brand new complex body plans out of nothing, in the blink of an eye? And isn’t it amazing that this evidence doesn’t falsify naturalism at all! Oh, no no no no no no, it doesn’t – because naturalism is a blind faith commitment. Evidence is irrelevant to a blind faith commitment. The entire physical universe can pop into being out of nothing, but naturalism is still true – because they want it to be true. All praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

The more body plans that appear suddenly, the less plausible evolution becomes. You can’t have a massive infusion of biological information appearing out of nowhere without an intelligent agent to sequence the individual characters. New software requires a software engineer.

Related posts

Polemics

William Lane Craig answers a question from our own commenter Martin

2 Comments

Here’s the original comment from Martin.

I thought this was a pretty good objection, and I said so. Well, Martin submitted it as a question to Bill, and Bill replied.

Here is his question to Dr. Craig, which is similar to what he asked before:

I’ve been thinking about the fine tuning argument, and while I like it and think it carries some weight, something about it bothers me. It seems to suffer from “life chauvinism.”

In a poker hand a royal flush has intrinsic value and thus being dealt that hand is highly improbable and quite amazing. But that’s because the rules of the game define a royal flush as having value before the hand is dealt.

What is the justification for asserting that life is the royal flush?

Life could be defined as an “amazing and improbable phenomenon” X1. Singing gas could be defined as “amazing and improbable phenomenon” X2. Rainbow planets with rings of fire could be X3. And so on.

Each phenomena is equally improbable and can only come about by a certain setting of the universal constants. Why assert that X1 has intrinsic value? Couldn’t X2 “complain” that we are being phenomenonists by claiming that X1 is best?

It just seems to me that the rules about royal flushes are being made up only after the hand has been dealt.

Martin

And you can read Dr. Craig’s reply here. He starts by saying this “This is a very good question, Martin, about which I’d like to think more. But here are some preliminary reflections.”

I like this response because I actually had to study Bayes Theorem for my machine learning classes in grad school. So this was good because I actually get to use computer science for something useful for a change. (By the way, my New Zealand readers, I used the Weka machine learning software library).

Wow! We have the smartest commenters. Just last week that woman who I like was asking me about divine aseity. Like I know what to say about that. Well, I did say something to her that seemed to make sense to her, but she still has more questions. That’s Bill’s current area of research, you know.

On Guard

By the way, I know some of you have no idea who Bill Craig is, and I am afraid I will have to smite you with my foam bat for this grave infraction. But there is a way out. You can read chapter 1 of Bill Craig’s new book “On Guard” right here on his web site. It’s an introduction to apologetics from the top Christian apologist of all time. And if you like it, you can order it and read the whole thing. It’s dirt cheap on Amazon.com.

Videos

What would a Christian apologetics movie look like?

10 Comments

I found this video at Rational Thoughts.

This movie clip was made by Brian Godawa.

One of our commenters Kelli Welch just got her first movie on the big screen as well. She is interested in making films from a Christian worldview.

More on God and morality

Oh, I just noticed this related post from Cloud of Witnesses  via the Apologetics 315 Twitter feed.

This is a quote from Chad Meister from the new book “God is Great, God is Good“, edited by William Lane Craig and Chad Meister.

Excerpt:

“If evil truly exists, what we could call ‘objective evil’ — then there also exist objective moral values, moral values which are binding on all people, whether they acknowledge them as such or not.  If rape, racism, torture, murder, government-sanctioned genocide and so forth are objectively evil, what makes them so?  What makes them truly evil, rather than simply activities we dislike?  What made the atrocities of the Nazis evil, even though Hitler and his thugs maintained otherwise?  One cannot consistently affirm both that there are no objective moral values, on the one hand, and that rape, torture and the like are objectively morally evil on the other.  If there are objective moral values, there must be some basis — some metaphysical foundation — for their being so. . . .

But [you] can’t have [your] cake and eat it too.  If good and evil are objectively real, they need an objective foundation.  No atheist has provided one, and it’s doubtful that one will be forthcoming.

See, this is the kind of book that Christians should read, because it helps them to talk to their neighbors and to raise their children. Everyone needs to understand the moral argument, and to bring people to account when they claim to be a “good person”. What does good even mean, based on the claimant’s worldview?

Make sure you all follow Brian’s Twitter feed.