Tag Archives: Evidence

Podcasts

German historian Jurgen Speiss outlines a case for the resurrection of Jesus

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A prominent German scholar defends the resurrection. (H/T Apologetics 315)

The MP3 file is here.

Speaker info:

Dr Jürgen Spiess is the founder and director of the “Institute of Science and Faith” (www.iguw.de) in Marburg/Germany. He studied at the University of Munich, where he  took a  PhD in Ancient History (with the subsidiary subjects “Egyptology” and “Philosophy of History”).

For fifteen years, he acted as General Secretary of SMD (IFES-Germany).  He is author and editor of books and articles including the subjects; F.M. Dostoevsky, C.S. Lewis, Medical Ethics, Science and Faith, The Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and Christian Apologetics. He lectured at many European universities in Russia (St. Petersburg, Novosobirsk, Irkutsk, Tomsk) Ukraine and Georgia. He is a member of the “German Dostoevsky Society” and the “Inklings Society.” He lost his first family (wife and child) by a car accident. He is married again and has one daughter.

Topics:

  • How did Jurgen become a Christian?
  • What is Jurgen’s academic background?
  • Can science detect historical miracles?
  • How history is more like legal work
  • the difference between what is plausible and what happened
  • what are the earliest and best sources for the life of Jesus?
  • are the authors of the New Testament trying to write history?
  • how Luke and Acts is based on eyewitnesses and Luke’s experiences
  • when were the gospels written?
  • how the destruction of Jerusalem helps us to date the sources
  • how early are the earliest extant manuscript fragments?
  • how early are the earliest extant complete manuscripts?
  • how good is the evidence for the empty tomb?
  • the significance of women discovering the empty tomb
  • did Jews expect that one person alone would rise before all?
  • if the tomb was not empty, why didn’t anyone produce the body?
  • the appearances are in the gospels, Acts and 1 Cor 15:3-7
  • 1 Cor 15:3-7 was received by Paul 1-6 years after Jesus’ death
  • 1 Cor was written in 55 A.D. by Paul
  • the disciples had to have an experience to change their lives
  • what does the resurrection mean to Christians today?

There is a period of (hostile) Q&A at the end of the lecture.

You can also read more about the European Leadership Forum.

Further study

The top 10 links to help you along with your learning.

  1. How every Christian can learn to explain the resurrection of Jesus to others
  2. The earliest source for the minimal facts about the resurrection
  3. The earliest sources for the empty tomb narrative
  4. Who were the first witnesses to the empty tomb?
  5. Did the divinity of Jesus emerge slowly after many years of embellishments?
  6. What about all those other books that the Church left out the Bible?
  7. Assessing Bart Ehrman’s case against the resurrection of Jesus
  8. William Lane Craig debates radical skeptics on the resurrection of Jesus
  9. Did Christianity copy from Buddhism, Mithraism or the myth of Osiris?
  10. Quick overview of N.T. Wright’s case for the resurrection

Debates are a fun way to learn

Two debates where you can see this play out:

Or you can listen to my favorite debate on the resurrection.

Extra stuff

Stand to Reason has a post featuring Mike Licona discussing Ehrman.

Polemics

Has the progress of science vindicated Mike Behe or Ken Miller?

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ECM send me a couple of articles recently from Uncommon Descent and Evolution News that I wanted to write about.

The topic is Junk DNA, which is the name given by naturalists to the portions of the DNA code that do not code for proteins. Is Junk DNA really just leftover junk from a blind, purposeless process of fully naturalistic evolution? Or does it have a function, like intelligent design theorists say? Let’s put these predictions to the test and then update our worldviews to fit with the scientific evidence.

The prediction of Ken Miller

Anti-theistic biologist Ken Miller said in 1994 that DNA is filled with junk left over from naturalistic, random evolution:

…the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles.

Ken Miller

One thing you have to like about Ken is that he manages to fit in some predictions along with his factually incorrect statements under oath.

The prediction of Michael Behe

Theistic biologist Michael Behe said in 2002 that DNA isn’t as junky some people think, because of the evidence:

As a public skeptic of the ability of Darwinian processes to account for complex cellular systems and a proponent of the hypothesis of intelligent design, (1) I often encounter a rebuttal that can be paraphrased as “no designer would have done it that way.” …
If at least some pseudogenes have unsuspected functions, however, might not other biological features that strike us as odd also have functions we have not yet discovered? Might even the backwards wiring of the vertebrate eye serve some useful purpose?
….
Hirotsune et al’s (3) work has forcefully shown that our intuitions about what is functionless in biology are not to be trusted.

Sincerely, Michael J. Behe
An Open Letter to Nature

Those are the two predictions.

So, what does the progress of science say to confirm one prediction or the other? Well, let’s see what Nature, the most prestigious peer-reviewed science journal, has to say.

In 1961, French biologists François Jacob and Jacques Monod proposed the idea that ‘regulator’ proteins bind to DNA to control the expression of genes. Five years later, American biochemist Walter Gilbert confirmed this model by discovering the lac repressor protein, which binds to DNA to control lactose metabolism in Escherichia colibacteria1. For the rest of the twentieth century, scientists expanded on the details of the model, but they were confident that they understood the basics. “The crux of regulation,” says the 1997 genetics textbook Genes VI (Oxford Univ. Press), “is that a regulator gene codes for a regulator protein that controls transcription by binding to particular site(s) on DNA.”

Just one decade of post-genome biology has exploded that view. Biology’s new glimpse at a universe of non-coding DNA — what used to be called ‘junk’ DNA — has been fascinating and befuddling. Researchers from an international collaborative project called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) showed that in a selected portion of the genome containing just a few per cent of protein-coding sequence, between 74% and 93% of DNA was transcribed into RNA2. Much non-coding DNA has a regulatory role; small RNAs of different varieties seem to control gene expression at the level of both DNA and RNA transcripts in ways that are still only beginning to become clear. “Just the sheer existence of these exotic regulators suggests that our understanding about the most basic things — such as how a cell turns on and off — is incredibly naive,” says Joshua Plotkin, a mathematical biologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

On the Evolution News post, pro-ID guy Rob Crowther writes:

…not that long ago, junk DNA was being defended as an important element of the Darwinian evolution paradigm… The question now seems to be whether Ayala, Dawkins, Collins, Falk and other junk DNA proponents will continue to defend junk DNA, whatever they call it?

The post by Rob Crowther has more information on this story.

If you are one of those people who thinks that naturalistic molecules-to-man evolution is as proved as is the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun, then check out the links below – ESPECIALLY the debates. Peter Atkins, Michael Shermer and Lewis Wolpert are some of the most prominent prominent proponents of naturalism and materialism out there. Watch the debates. Have an open mind. If science can be hijacked by global warmists, then it can be hijacked by evolutionists, too. We need to guard against that.

I know there is a lot of pressure on people to just believe in naturalism, especially when their degree or career depends on a public profession of faith in the power of chance and material processes. But we have to follow the evidence – science is about evidence, not ideology. Science is about testing to see what is true, not forcing the evidence to confirm what you want to believe (e.g. – materialism). There is a difference between the religious assumption of naturalism/materialism and the scientific method of predicting and testing.

Related posts

Learn more about intelligent design

Podcasts

Should pro-lifers argue against sexual libertinism?

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Consider this article from Christianity Today about the tactics of the pro-life movement by Dinesh D’Souza.

Excerpt:

Why then, in the face of its bad arguments, does the pro-choice movement continue to prevail legally and politically?

I think it’s because abortion is the debris of the sexual revolution. We have seen a great shift in the sexual mores of Americans in the past half-century. Today a widespread social understanding persists that if there is going to be sex outside marriage, there will be a considerable number of unwanted pregnancies. Abortion is viewed as a necessary clean-up solution to this social reality.

In order to have a sexual revolution, women must have the same sexual autonomy as men. But the laws of biology contradict this ideology, so feminists who have championed the sexual revolution—Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Shulamith Firestone, among others—have found it necessary to denounce pregnancy as an invasion of the female body. The fetus becomes, in Firestone’s phrase, an “uninvited guest.” As long as the fetus occupies the mother’s womb, these activists argue, the mother should be able to keep it or get rid of it at her discretion.

If you’re going to make an omelet, the Marxist revolutionaries used to say, you have to be ready to break some eggs. And if you’re going to have a sexual revolution, you have to be ready to clean up the debris. After 35 years, the debris has become a mountain, and as a society, we are still adding bodies to the heap. No one in the pro-choice camp, of course, wants to admit any of this. It’s not only politically embarrassing, it’s also painful to one’s self-image to acknowledge a willingness to sustain permissive sexual values by killing the unborn.

This analysis might help to explain why otherwise compassionate people fight so tenaciously against the most helpless and vulnerable of all living creatures, unborn persons.

Here is a podcast from the Life Training Institute discussing that article.

The MP3 file is here. (Just the first 34 minutes)

Topics:

  • Dinesh says to argue against sexual promiscuity as part of pro-life apologetics
  • LTI’s general position is to focus on the humanity of the unborn
  • should pro-lifers change strategies to argue against sexual libertinism
  • is Dinesh right to say that arguing for the humanity of the unborn is not enough?
  • how strong are the philosophical arguments for the pro-life position
  • why has the effort to de-fund Planned Parenthood failed?
  • have the best arguments for the pro-life position become common knowledge?
  • do women who have abortions believe that the unborn are human or not?
  • do the arguments against abortion address the real circumstances of the woman?
  • why do people accept the humanity of the unborn, but still are pro-choice?
  • do people accept abortion because they refuse to give up sexual libertinism?
  • what is really behind the disrespect that people for the right to life?
  • is it possible for pro-lifers to convince people to give up irresponsible sex?
  • how did people begin to believe that a sexual revolution was a good idea?
  • has the sexual revolution increased or decreased social ills like divorce?
  • can a scientific case be made that sexual libertinism is destructive and costly?
  • should pro-lifers argue abortion on moral ground alone, or on utilitarian grounds?

This first file switches topics about 34 minutes into the podcast. There is actually a second file, too.

The MP3 file for part two is here.

The second topic is a paper written by an abortionist who is performing abortions while she is pregnant. She talks about performing a second-trimester abortion in the paper. Just as she describes tearing out the leg of the baby inside the other woman, her own baby kicks inside her abdomen. It’s interesting to hear this woman explain her feelings about this occurrence, and how she wants to suppress them. You can listen to the rest of the first MP3 file and then the second file as well to hear about that topic.

My thoughts

I have a lot of friends in the pro-life movement, and I also donate to pro-life debaters and sponsor pro-life events, (and I do the same for the marriage issue). But there is something else I do, too. I feel very, very badly about how women have adopted the habit of having sex before marriage, simply because they have bought into feminist ideology hook, line and sinker. Premarital sex causes women a lot of pain and emotional damage, as I described before. By abolishing sex roles, women are left with no idea about how to make a man love them and commit to them.

So it’s not just that I oppose abortion and support traditional marriage. It’s not just that I oppose women who murder their unborn children and who raise children without fathers. It’s that I oppose premarital sex, period. And I oppose the root of all these problems – feminism. It’s feminism that abolishes sex roles, chivalry, courting, romance, traditional marriage, two-parent families, at-fault divorce laws, small government, and eventually, liberty itself. And the way that I argue against feminism is by sharing the way that I treat women with you, my readers.

You can read more about my anti-feminist, pro-woman, pro-life, pro-marriage views in the related posts below.

Related posts on chastity, chivalry, courtship and marriage

Related posts on feminism and sexual libertinism

    Related posts on abortion

    Related posts on adult stem cell research