Tag Archives: Faith

News

The Cambrian explosion is getting more explosive

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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.

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Mentoring

Twenty ideas for doing apologetics from Apologetics 315

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The post is here.

Here are the ones I do from his list:

1. Give to an apologetics ministry
2. Get books into the hands of the right people (Love Your God with All Your Mind)
3. Organize apologetics conferences
5. Comment on blogs
6. Start your own blog (Blogger, WordPress)
7. Give people CDs and MP3s to listen to

That’s right – there’s a ton of them on there that I don’t do! But they are ALL do-able!

Leave a comment if you think of more. The one I thought of that isn’t on his list is to talk to your co-workers about your faith. But the first commenter mentions it. Here some links below. I recommend the co-workers one and the defend your faith in public one.

Mentoring

Apologetics advocacy

Mentoring

The importance of being the first to frame issues for your children

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Dan’s post at The Bumbling Genius on the importance of parents talking to their children FIRST about controversial issues related to Christianity is a must-read. The post drew 100 comments, so far. The post is here.

Excerpt:

The common assertion that “Christians are narrow-minded, or anti-science” is a logical fallacy called”Poisoning the Well”. Well poisoning is a preempted ad hominem attack that attempts to pre-program, or especially in this case to embed into society’s thinking a predisposition against a particular point of view.

My first exposure to the effectiveness of this tactic-from the outside looking in-occurred during discussions in my home with Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was here that I began to appreciate the persuasive power of this logical fallacy, and to develop a similar technique in teaching my own children in ways to help insulate them against this kind of mind poisoning by doing a little pre-poisoning of the well of their thinking myself. I hope to accomplish this by being the first to present the messages of our culture except that I do so under the microscope of scripture, logic, and objective truth. In this way I am the one setting the table, so to speak, for the future discussions my children will encounter involving their worldview.

Not unlike the tactics used by the JW’s and anti-Christ cultural apologist, as I teach my children I employ the key concept of “firsts.” For example: when an institution or media is the first to present a cultural issue, and also the first to present my response in a “closed-minded”, “Christian” caricatured stereotype, followed by their a pithy, high-browed, and cognitive dissonant response to that stereotype, then my children’s Well becomes poisoned against my teaching. Everything I as parent subsequently espouse may then be seen through the lens of that stereotype. On the other hand, if I am the first to present the tenets of those opposing worldviews along with a logical and realistic explanation as to why they are flawed, then I will have achieved the objective of firsts.

This is something Christian parents really need to think about. You want to inoculate your children against pressure from teachers and peers by discussing issues long before they are introduced in the classroom or the playground. And you should be on guard against other sources of sin and lies, too.