Tag Archives: Naturalism

News

Global warming alert: Washington, D.C. breaks 141-year-old cold record

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The leftist Washington Post reports.

Excerpt:

Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport broke a 141-year-old record low temperature, reaching 4 degrees. The National Weather Service said the low reached early Tuesday broke a 5-degree record set on the day in 1873. It was also a record low for the month of March. Dulles International Airport – also outside Washington – tied a 1993 record for the month at -1 degree.

Both airports broke record lows two days in a row.

Schools and government offices along the East Coast were closed Tuesday or delayed opening. Virginia State Police said slickened roads were factors in three traffic deaths. And authorities in Maryland’s Prince George’s County said a 60-year-old woman died after shoveling snow there.

Global warming is to blame for these record cold temperatures. But wait, Washington wasn’t the only one victimized by the global warming monster.

On Monday, leftist Reuters reports that the cold was all up and down the East coast.

Excerpt:

A deadly winter storm hit the U.S. East Coast on Monday with freezing rain, snow and near-record cold, cancelling about 2,700 flights, shutting down Washington and closing schools and local governments.

The latest in a series of weather systems to pummel the winter-weary eastern United States, the storm dumped about 4 inches on the U.S. capital by early afternoon as it swept from the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic coast, the National Weather Service said.

Brian Hurley, a weather service meteorologist, said temperatures would be about 30 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius) below normal as a cold front settled in from Great Plains to the Atlantic coast.

“It’s really, really cold, temperatures dropping into the teens (Fahrenheit, minus-7 to minus-10 Celsius) and the normal highs are around 50 (10C) at this point,” he said.

At least four weather-related traffic deaths in Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee were blamed on the wide-ranging storm over the weekend.

And on Tuesday, leftist Reuters reported that the cold had spread westward.

Excerpt:

The eastern and central United States were plunged into a deep freeze on Tuesday, with record low temperatures in the wake of a deadly storm expected to moderate in coming days.

The late-winter storm left behind frigid temperatures after pushing freezing rain, sleet and snow from the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Temperatures this week will be “below average east of the Rockies, as it has been for a good part of the winter,” said Bob Oravec, a National Weather Service meteorologist in College Park, Maryland.

The icy front sent the mercury plunging to minus 1F (minus 18C) at Washington Dulles International Airport, tying a monthly record, the weather service said.

Baltimore; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Morgantown, West Virginia; Zanesville, Ohio; and Flint, Michigan all set or tied record lows.

The latest in a series of arctic weather systems to grip the winter-weary eastern United States, the cold front stretched from the Canadian border to southern Texas, where freezing rain was forecast.

[…]The storm was blamed for at least six deaths, most of them from traffic accidents on slippery roads. A woman in Bowie, Maryland, died on Monday from a likely heart attack after shoveling snow, a spokesman for the Prince George’s County fire department said.

About 730 U.S. flights were canceled and about 2,700 delayed on Tuesday in the wake of the bad weather, according to airline tracking site FlightAware.com. About 8,000 flights were canceled or delayed on Monday.

Those people were not killed by record cold temperatures, they were killed by the global warming monster!!1! They were caught up in a fiery explosion caused by cowboy capitalism and insufficient government spending on science education. We need more grant money for a study to find out why you believe your own eyes, rather than the dire warnings of greedy scientists and their power-hungry socialist masters in government.

Videos

Peter J. Williams lectures on the historical reliability of the gospel narratives

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Peter J. Williams
Peter J. Williams

Greg West of The Poached Egg tweeted this lecture featuring Peter D. Williams yesterday, and I’m posting it today with a summary below.

Here’s the main lecture: (54 minutes)

And here’s the Q&A: (9 minutes)

About Peter Williams:

Peter J. Williams is the Warden (CEO) of Tyndale House and a member of the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. He received his MA, MPhil and PhD, in the study of ancient languages related to the Bible from Cambridge University. After his PhD, he was on staff in the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University (1997–1998), and thereafter taught Hebrew and Old Testament there as Affiliated Lecturer in Hebrew and Aramaic and as Research Fellow in Old Testament at Tyndale House, Cambridge (1998–2003). From 2003 to 2007 he was on the faculty of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where he became a Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Deputy Head of the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy. In July 2007 he became the youngest Warden in the history of Tyndale House. He also retains his position as an honorary Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Aberdeen.

Summary of the lecture:

  • What if the stories about Jesus are legendary?
  • were the gospels transmitted accurately?
  • were the gospels written in the same place as where the events happened?
  • do the gospel authors know the customs and locations where the events happened?
  • do the gospels use the right names for the time and place where the events took place?
  • do the gospels disambiguate people’s names depending on how common those names were?
  • how do the New Testament gospels compare to the later gnostic gospels?
  • how do the gospels refer to the main character? How non-Biblical sources refer to Jesus?
  • how does Jesus refer to himself in the gospels? do the later Christians refer to him that way?
  • how does Jesus teach? do later Christians teach the same way?
  • why didn’t Jesus say anything about early conflicts in the church (the Gentiles, church services)?
  • did the writers of the gospels know the places where the events took place?
  • how many places are named in the gospels? how about in the later gnostic gospels?
  • are the botanical details mentioned in the gospels accurate? how about the later gnostic gospels?

And here are the questions from the audience:

  • how what about the discrepancies in the resurrection narratives that Bart Ehrman is obsessed with?
  • what do you think of the new 2011 NIV translation (Peter is on the ESV translation committee)?
  • how did untrained, ordinary men produce complex, sophisticated documents like the gospels?
  • is oral tradition a strong enough bridge between the events and the writers who interviewed the eyewitnesses?
  • what does the name John mean?
  • why did the gospel writers wait so long before writing their gospels?
  • do you think that Matthew and Luke used a hypothetical source which historians call “Q”?
  • which gospel do critical historians trust the least and why?

I really enjoyed watching this lecture. He’s getting some of this material from Richard Bauckham’s awesome book “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses”, so if you aren’t familiar with it, you can get an idea of what’s in it. Peter Williams is a lot of fun to listen to – an excellent speaker.

You can read an interview with Peter Williams here on Between Two Worlds.

And you can listen to the Peter Williams vs Bart Ehrman debate. That link contains a link to the audio of the debate as well as my snarky summary. It’s very snarky.

And Apologetics 315 also posted Peter Williams’ assessment of Bart Ehrman’s “Misquoting Jesus”.

Podcasts

Jerry Coyne presents the strongest argument for Darwinian evolution

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What is the strongest argument for Darwinian evolution? This podcast explains the best way to persuade an intelligent design theorist to accept Darwinian evolution.

Details:

On this episode of ID the Future, David Klinghoffer announces Discovery Institute’s 2013 Censor of the Year award. Listen in as Klinghoffer explains why we’ve chosen to recognize University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, out of several promising nominees, for his success in choking off free speech on intelligent design and evolution.

The MP3 file is here.

The story behind this powerful argument is described in this post from Evolution News.

Excerpt:

Let me make clear at the outset: In naming University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne as “Censor of the Year,” we at the Center for Science & Culture are not bestowing an honor. While the idea of giving out a “prize” for something so malignant as censorship may sound like a lark, it’s not. As CSC associate director John West points out, “This is very serious business. Censorship retards the search for truth and hurts innocent people.”

And says Dr. West, “Among die-hard defenders of evolutionary orthodoxy, it’s now standard operating procedure.” This is how the scientific “consensus” against Darwin skeptics and intelligent-design advocates is maintained — by fear.

The “award” will be distributed this Wednesday, February 12, for Darwin Day.

Coyne was pivotal in stampeding Ball State University president Jo Ann Gora to issue a campus-wide gag order on teaching about intelligent design in science classrooms. This involved intimidating and silencing a young Ball State physicist, Eric Hedin. That’s censorship. But something that really stands out about Coyne’s effort is the power differential between himself and his victim.

Here’s Coyne, comfortable as could be in what sure sounds like an easy yet highly prestigious position at the University of Chicago. His workload is evidently so light that he has time to blog at Why Evolution Is True what seems like around the clock about frivolous pet topics. While he’s ostensibly a scientist, his main passion is bashing religion. Coyne is protected by tenure. He’s safe.

On the other hand we have Eric Hedin, at a state school, Ball State in Indiana, with considerably less cachet. Hedin is actively publishing in his field, unlike Coyne, but he is not tenured, and so his professional future is really on the line. His prospects are now far more fragile, thanks to Professor Jerry Coyne. Frittering away time blogging about cute animals and posting cartoons insulting various religions — as Coyne does — was not, I’m fairly sure, something that Dr. Hedin would have felt free to do if he was (highly unlikely) inclined to do it.

So we have the powerful, prestigious and above all safe Jerry Coyne, swooping in from the next state to rile up Hedin’s employers, Ball State’s administration. Why? Because Hedin included a bibliography in an interdisciplinary class that listed some books that were favorable to intelligent design (and others that were critical of it).

Coyne was not only successful in shutting down Hedin, and getting intelligent design shut down on the campus as a whole. He was also a bully, exploiting the difference in power to tyrannize and dominate a vulnerable younger scholar.

This is the best argument for Darwinism that I have ever heard: believe it, or we’ll destroy your academic career. I think that works on most Darwin skeptics. 

By the way, if you’re headed to the secular university, keep in mind that some departments don’t handle diversity well. If you disagree with evolutionary biologists, they don’t try to convince you. They just end your career. It’s that simple. Keep your views to yourself as long as you can. If you’re going to publicly question the 150-year-old theory of evolution, then do it with an alias.