Tag Archives: UK

Commentary

Hugh Ross debates Lewis Wolpert on scientific evidence for a Creator

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From the 2012 Unbelievable UK conference, Peter Byrom (BirdieUpon) reports on a great debate on science and Christianity.

Excerpt:

I had the great pleasure yesterday of attending the debate “Does the universe show evidence for a creator?” at Imperial College, London. Arguing in the affirmative was astrophysicist Hugh Ross of Reasons To Believe,  a science-faith think tank from the USA; arguing the negative was Lewis Wolpert, Emeritus Professor of biology and British Humanist.

[…]But, onto the debate itself! A good turn-out. The lecture theatre was packed. It was hosted by Imperial College’s Christian Union, but a decent number of atheists and sceptics showed up too – which is quite something given that AC Grayling was giving a lecture in the next room (he passed by me earlier as I was editing my latest Dawkins-critical video on my laptop… I don’t think he noticed)!

This is where it gets interesting. Hugh Ross went first, and outlined for 20 minutes his Creation Model, arguing that the Bible – and only the Bible – contains consistent, scientifically accurate predictions about the cosmos, the empirical data for which is only being discovered recently in the modern age. His case is essentially that the more we discover about the universe, the more the evidence for design and a transcendent creator piles up and confirms what the Bible has been telling us for the past thousands of years. Of particular note were passages from Jeremiah and Romans, which Hugh claims tell us about the expansion of the universe and the law of entropy. Alongside we have the opening of the Bible, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth – the Big Bang is this beginning. When this was discovered, a great many scientists were reluctant to accept it, fearing that an absolute beginning of space and time gave too much leverage to those who believe in theistic creation.

It was fascinating also to hear Hugh cite an article written by atheist physicists called “Disturbing Implications of the Cosmological Constant”. In this article, its atheist authors were forced to concede that this particular cosmological constant left them no choice but to invoke a transcendent causal agent. Their solution? To “do a Daniel Dennett”: conclude that this cosmological constant must, therefore, surely be false (!)

Go read the whole thing at Apologetics UK blog! It’s great when we have smart guys to give us a ringside report.

News

5,300 UK teens who aborted a baby in 2010 had at least one prior abortion

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Dina sent me this disturbing article from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Pro-life campaigners said young women were being ”let down in an appalling way” after it emerged three of the 38,269 teenagers who had a termination in 2010 had undergone the procedure at least seven times.

NHS figures released to the Press Association under the Freedom of Information Act show another two teenage girls had their seventh abortion in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, while four more teenagers had a termination for the sixth time.

Fourteen teenage girls had their fifth abortion in 2010, 57 teens had a termination for the fourth time and 485 women aged 19 or under went through the procedure for a third time.

Rebecca Mallinson, of the Pro Life Alliance, said: ”There is something seriously wrong with a country where teenagers are having even one abortion, let alone repeat abortions to this extent.

“We are failing these young people in an appalling way, and storing up serious sexual health problems for the future, whether the direct issue of sexually transmitted diseases, but also the effects that multiple abortions can have on future fertility.

[…]Of the abortions carried out on teenage girls in 2010, more than 5,300 were on teenagers who had already had at least one termination.

In the UK, taxpayers are forced to provide free abortions as part of their government-run socialist health care system. Many Christian voters are OK with subsidizing abortions because they think that wealth redistribution is a good idea. They think that people should be able to live any way they want, disregarding morality, and then have someone else violate their conscience in order to pay for the messes that result. It’s just wrong, but many Christians who care more about feelings than economics support it. They think that paying for someone else’s murders is “fairness”.

Christians should support individual charity, and the best way to support that is to let people keep more of their own money and give them tax deductions for charitable contributions. Whenever you get a secular government involved in helping others, it quite often just makes it easier for them to sin and to do harm. Thoughtful Christians should not support that. When you make sin “free” for someone by paying the costs, they will sin even more. We should never make it easier for people to sin. The first rule of sound economics – which Christians should know – is that when you subsidize a behavior, you get more of that behavior.

If you want to help someone in trouble, then use your own money – don’t take someone else’s money through taxes. People who make mistakes learn not to make them when they are accountable to the person who bails them out of it. There has to be oversight over how charity is being done at the individual level – not everyone deserves charity just because they are in a jam. Only if they have learned their lesson should they get it – go and sin no more, as Jesus says. That’s why individual charity is morally superior to government-run social programs. In a very real sense, Christians who claim to be pro-life can actually be pro-abortion in practice when they make it easier for women to have abortions.

In a previous post, I also wrote about how Christians should not tell women that premarital sex is a valid pathway to marriage – that men can be shamed and coerced into marriage after recreational sex with slogans like “man up”. That’s another mistake that many pastors make that increases the number of abortions. We have to start thinking things through if we are going to stop abortion.

News

UK doctors who refuse to perform sex changes can be banned from practicing

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Dina sent me this alarming article from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

The General Medical Council has issued guidance warning that it would be “discriminatory” for doctors not to prescribe either the pill or morning-after pill because they disagree with people having sex before marriage.

[…]The draft GMC guidelines, entitled Personal Beliefs and Medical Practice, stipulate that doctors “cannot be willing to provide married women with contraception but unwilling to prescribe it for unmarried women”.

“This would be a breach of our guidance as you would be refusing to treat a particular group of patients,” the document adds.

It also warns it would be illegal for doctors to refuse to carry out “gender reassignment”, because it would also amount to discrimination.

“Serious or persistent failure to follow this guidance will put your registration at risk,” the guidelines warn.

[…]Bishop Tom Williams of the Archdiocese of Liverpool claimed the advice discriminated against “certain groups of doctors” and risked creating an “atmosphere of fear” in which doctors would be “prohibited from ever expressing their own religion”.

Dr Peter Saunders, chief executive of the Christian Medical Fellowship and a former surgeon, said the rules would “marginalise Christian health professionals in Britain”.

He told the Daily Mail: “The problem is that 21st century British medicine now involves practices which many doctors regard as unethical.”

In other secular left regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, conscience rights for medical professionals were similarly frowned upon. For a socialist, whatever the state wants is right, and who cares about the individual’s freedom?

Many Christians today in the United States, and especially in socialist countries, think that it is a good idea for the government to provide medical care to everyone, regardless of their lifestyle choices. It doesn’t matter if some people are freely choosing lifestyles that expose them to higher medical costs, like promiscuity or homosexuality. These socialist Christians think that individuals and their employers should be taxed in order to pay for abortions, sex changes, HIV treatments, and so on. The secular left things that birth control pills, which can cause abortions, are “health care”, and socialist Christians agree with them.

A dollar can only be spent one way. It can be spent on an apologetics book, or it can be spent on a sex change. It can be spent on private Christian school tuition or it can be spent on a partial birth abortion. What would God prefer? Would he rather that people who are sinning face higher costs for their sins, so that they think twice about committing them? Or would he rather that people who are sinning have the costs paid by someone else who isn’t, so that the sin becomes cheaper? Well, when I talk to socialist Christians, especially in Canada, they think that God is happier with a bigger secular government, so that sinful people have lower costs and government approval. That doesn’t make sense to me, though.