Series: Question of the week by Dr. William Lane Craig

Today we will have the second installment from our series Question or the week. Just a reminder, check on really Dr. Craig's website reasonablefaith.Org where you will find over 250 questions and you can also get to know him and his ministry better.


Question:
Dear Dr.Craig,


In the book "Four Views on Divine Providence", scholar Paul Kjoss Helseth raised some questions about your molinist model that you hadn't the chance to reply in detail.
For me the most important and crucial of Helseth's questions is this:
"What is the ontological status of counterfactuals of creaturely freeedom for Molinists generally and Dr.Craig in particular.?" (p.101)
In my opinion, the molinistic model stands or falls with the reply to the above question.
As far I understand Helseth's question, he's asking if such counterfactuals refers to an ontologically objective reality. (He's not asking if such counterfactuals, qua propositions, exist as abstract objects in any Platonic sense).
Moreover, I'd add a similar question to Helseth's: Which is the ontological status of the "will" statements which belong to God's foreknowledge? Do they refer to an ontologically existent, actual, objective reality in the moment of God's foreknowledge?
In your book "The only wise God", you argue that God's foreknowledge that Jones "will" do X, doesn't imply that Jones "must" do X. (Jones is still free to do otherwise, only that he won't do).
I find this argument unsatisfactory in the light of Helseth's question: Which is the ontological status the action X (that will be performed) by Jones?


If x exists (objectively), then it is impossible that Jones could ACTUALLY do otherwise, and the distinction between "will" and "must" seems to be merely semantic or linguistic, not ontological. (Note that Jones "could" do otherwise only in a purely theoretical or logical sense, not in an ontological or metaphysical one because what he will do is factually and metaphysically unavoidable).
If X doesn't exist objectively (but only AFTER Jones actually do it), then statements about the future are not true, and God's foreknowledge cannot be knowledge at all (in the sense of justified true belief). Hence, God couldn't have foreknowledge of creaturely free decisions.
So, does a "will" statament refers to something objectively existing (i.e. to an actually existing state of affairs)?
My lay opinion is this:
Future events grounded in creaturely free decisions don't exist before they're performed. The future doesn't exist in any objective sense. Therefore, all the "will" statements (not based on inference but in actual foreknowledge of free decisions) cannot be true, and hence God doesn't have foreknowledge.
Free decisions become true ONLY after they're freely taken by the individual and just in this moment they have truth values that can be known by God.
So, propositions about the future are not true before the future is actualized.
However, what is true are the future CONSEQUENCES of sum of everybody actions in a given time, and possibly this is what could be known in cases of human precognition and divine "foreknowledge".
People with precognitive faculties could know (bia paranormal means, let's to grant) the consequences of people's actions (performed in given time, let's say in February 18th, 2012)
For example, the consequences of people's actions in February 18th of 2012 will produce, ceteris paribus, such and such specific effects in 2016, and this effects could be known NOW (via paranormal means) by certain human beings and God. But this effects can be changed by the actions of people in March of 2012.
So, for each actual action, a given future consequence will follow, and in principle it can be known. But the next action could change these consequences, and to produce others consequences, which in turn could be known too.
I don't know if this proposal is too naive or ignorant, but it seems to me to be right at least in an intuitive level, as the best way to make sense of the compatibility of foreknowledge, precognition and human freedom.


Thanks,


Mary
Venezuela

Please follow the link below to see Dr. Craig's response.

ANSWER

If you have any questions please email me or pastor J and we'll do our best to get back to you as soon as possible with a satisfactory answer.

Until next time and remember.......

Have an Intelligent Faith!!!!

-Nelis

"Why Apologetics important for Christians?" - Frank Turek, author and CEO

"Apologetics doesn't help anyone!"

"Just believe and have faith, that's all you need."

"Stop being so intellectual and just love people like Jesus did."

Have you ever heard any of the above responses or comments when discussing the necessity of having intelligent reasons for your Christian faith?  In this short but quality video, Frank Turek, leader of CrossExamined Ministries and co-author of "I Don't Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist", explains why knowing how to defend your faith is such a vital aspect of Christian discipleship today!

I hope his answer encourages you to continue to grow deeper in this area yourself, as well.

Until next time, have an  Intelligent Faith!

- Pastor J. 

SERIES: "Good Arguments for God's Existence - Cosmological Argument from Contingency" - Final Summary

"Why does anything exist at all, as opposed to nothing?"

"Is there an explanation for every being that exists?"

Christian philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, proposed that the answer to the above 2 questions lay in the concept of a Necessary Being, i.e. God.  His argument went like this:

1. Everything that exists has an explanation, either in the necessity of it's own nature, or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the explanation of the universe is God. 

Is this argument coherent?  
Does it contain logical errors? 
 Does this argument make sense? 

Watch this last video for this argument, where we summarize it from beginning to end, and you decide if it's convincing or not.  I think it is a very powerful concept, which points to a Being which is Necessary, timeless, immaterial, incredibly powerful, and personal!  Sounds a bit like the God of Scripture to me!  Let me know what you think....


Until next time..... have an Intelligent Faith!

Series - "Icons of Evolution, Darwin's Tree of Life, Why this is NOT scientific"

“The evidence that all life, plants and animals, humans and fruit flies, evolved from a common ancestor by mutation and natural selection is beyond theory. It is a fact. Anyone who takes the time to read the evidence with an open mind will join scientists and the well-educated”

The take-home message is that if you doubt Darwin’s tree of life, you’re ignorant. No one wants to be ridiculed, so it’s a lot easier to buy the rhetoric and “join scientists and the well-educated.” 

This will be the last post of 4 from the “Darwin's Tree of life” series. Today we will be looking why this is NOT scientific and what scientists say. Here are 2 articles from the New Scientist magazine:

As far as the data is concerned, a New Scientist article admits, “Ever since Darwin the tree has been the unifying principle for understanding the history of life on Earth,” but because “different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories,” the notion of a tree of life is now quickly becoming a vision of the past — as the article stated “today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded,” and as scientists quoted in the article said, “We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality” or the tree is being “annihilated.” Perhaps the reason why different genes are telling “different evolutionary stories” is because the genes have wholly different stories to tell, namely stories that indicate that all organisms are not genetically related. For those open-minded enough to consider it, common design is a viable alternative to common descent. 

1. Evolution is far too complex to be explained by a few roots and branches, they claim.
2. But today the project [tree of life] lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence.
3. Dr. Eric Bapteste: We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality.
4. By the mid-1980s there was great optimism that molecular techniques would finally reveal the universal tree of life in all its glory. Ironically, the opposite happened.
5. "As early as 1993, some were proposing that for bacteria and archaea the tree of life was more like a web. In 1999, Doolittle made the provocative claim that "the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree" (Science, vol 284, p 2124). "The tree of life is not something that exists in nature, it's a way that humans classify nature," he says."
6. Dr. John Dupré: If there is a tree of life it's a small irregular structure growing out of the web of life.
7. Dr. John Dupré: Our standard model of evolution is under enormous pressure.
8. Dr. Michael Rose: The tree of life is being politely buried – we all know that. What's less accepted is our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change.
9. Surprisingly, HGT [horizontal gene transfer] also turns out to be the rule rather than the exception in the third great domain of life, the eukaryotes. For a start, it is increasingly accepted that the eukaryotes originated by the fusion of two prokaryotes, one bacterial and the other archaeal..."
10. Having uprooted the tree of unicellular life, biologists are now taking their axes to the remaining branches.
11. Some researchers are also convinced that hybridization has been a major driving force in animal evolution, and that the process is ongoing....This is especially true in rapidly evolving lineages with lots of recently diverged species...

 

There was a huge uproar from evolutionary scientists when these articles were published, but the facts still remain and they CANNOT be ignored. Like I mentioned in the beginning of the series, if even one doubt about ANY theory surfaces it NEEDS to be reexamined and even marked as a myth. We all know that will not be the case for evolution very soon, but more and more scientists who dig a bit deeper are seeing what a “scam” evolution actually is.

Research the evidence for yourself, from both sides, and you will see where the truth will lead you. I pray that all who reads this will come into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and remember……

Have an Intelligent Faith!!

-Nelis

Are You Looking for the Simplest and Clearest Argument for Intelligent Design?

Evolution is a Natural Process Running Backward

Are You Looking for the Simplest and Clearest Argument for Intelligent Design?

Here is an article form Granville Sewell: "Can ANYTHING Happen in an Open System?

Mathematicians are trained to value simplicity. When we have a simple, clear proof of a theorem, and a long, complicated, counter-argument, full of hotly debated and unverifiable points, we accept the simple proof, even before we find the errors in the complicated argument. That is why I prefer not to extend here the long-standing debate over the first point [irreducible complexity], but to dwell further on the much simpler and clearer second point of my article, which is that the increase in order observed on Earth (and here alone, as far as we know) violates the laws of probability and the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular fashion.

Evolutionists have always dismissed this argument by saying that the second law of thermodynamics only dictates that order cannot increase in an isolated (closed) system, and the Earth is not a closed system -- in particular, it receives energy from the Sun. The second law allows order to increase locally, provided the local increase is offset by an equal or greater decrease in the rest of the universe. This always seems to be the end of the argument: order can increase (entropy can decrease) in an open system, therefore, ANYTHING can happen in an open system, even the rearrangement of atoms into computers, without violating the second law.

Sewell is signatory to the Discovery Institute's A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism petition. In 2000 Sewell compared the lifelong development of his state of the art software program with Darwin's predictions.

To read more about him click here

Have an Intelligent Faith!!!

-Nelis

SERIES: "Ancient Non-christian Historical Sources for Jesus"

(Part 2 of 2)  Here is the second installment of a special video addition I made to our "Ancient Non-Christian Historical Sources for Jesus" series.  This speaker's presentation is good, the information is solid, and hopefully it will hold you over through the weekend.

I encourage you to find someone this upcoming week, and purposefully/proactively engage them in a conversation about the historical evidence for the person of Jesus.  Be kind and patient, but seek out an opportunity to be an ambassador of the Truth, and a witness for Christ this week!

Have a great weekend!  Remember.... have an Intelligent Faith!

- Pastor J. 

Harvard University Law Professor Believes in Jesus Christ? - SERIES: "Ancient Non-Christian Historical Evidence for Jesus"

Harvard University, Royal Law Professor, 

and world renowned courtroom evidence expert:

Simon Greenleaf

This is an interesting 2 part video series that I wanted to introduce into our series on "Ancient Non-christian Historical Evidence for Jesus of Nazareth".  In this first video, you will be introduced to an interesting scholar of law and the courtroom standards for evidence, Simon Greenleaf.  

As you will learn, Greenleaf is was the Royal Professor of Law at Harvard in his day and literally wrote the book that determines the rules and standards for good/acceptable courtroom evidence.  Greenleaf was a legal scholar and firm believer in Jesus Christ historically.  He also went on to write a book entitled "The Testimony Of The Evangelists" which examines the historical and textual evidence of the 4 Gospels in the New Testament.  How would these 4 documents fare, if submitted to an examination of them in light of the Harvard and legal standards for courtroom evidence?  Watch and find out.....

Remember.... have an Intelligent Faith!!

- Pastor J. 

** 10 Great Apologetic Books For Your Library!! **

Series: "The Case for a Creator,Evidence of Physics: The Cosmos on a Razor’s Edge"

It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in numbers, has been rather carefully thought out. . . . The seemingly miraculous concurrence of these numerical values must remain the most compelling evidence for cosmic design. Physicist Paul Davies

Would it not be strange if a universe without purpose accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with purpose? Sir John Templeton.

Patrick Glynn became a confirmed atheist by the time he received his doctorate from Harvard University in the 1970s. “Darwin had demonstrated that it was not even necessary to posit a God to explain the origin of life,” he said. “Life, and the human species itself, was the outcome of essentially random mechanisms operating over the eons.”

“Gradually, I realized that in the twenty years since I opted for philosophical atheism, a vast, systematic literature had emerged that not only cast deep doubt on, but also, from any reasonable perspective, effectively refuted my atheistic outlook. . . . Today, it seems to me, there is no good reason for an intelligent person to embrace the illusion of atheism or agnosticism, to make the same intellectual mistakes I made”

Like so many people claiming to be atheists, believing what “science books” had taught them and that there is no place for God in science, until he started doing his own research. In his book God: the Evidence, he  gives credit to the absolutely incredible fine-tuning of the cosmos, and that is one of the key reasons why he concluded that the universe must have been the handiwork of a master designer.

What does fine-tuning mean?

“When scientists talk about the fine-tuning of the universe, they’re generally referring to the extraordinary balancing of the fundamental laws and parameters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe. Our minds can’t comprehend precision of some of them. The result is a universe that has just the right conditions to sustain life. The coincidences are simply too amazing to have been the result of happenstance—as Paul Davies said, ‘the impression of design is overwhelming.’

Take a look at this analogy of astronauts landing on Mars and finding an enclosed biosphere, sort of like the domed structure that was built in Arizona a few years ago. At the control panel they find that all the dials for its environment are set just right for life. The oxygen ratio is perfect; the temperature is seventy degrees; the humidity is fifty percent; there’s a system for replenishing the air; there are systems for producing food, generating energy, and disposing of wastes. Each dial has a huge range of possible settings, and you can see if you were to adjust one or more of them just a little bit, the environment would go out of whack and life would be impossible. What conclusion would you draw from that?” The answer was obvious. ““That someone took great care in designing and building it,”

“You’d conclude that this biosphere was not there by accident. Volcanoes didn’t erupt and spew out the right compounds that just happened to assemble themselves into the biosphere. Some intelligent being had intentionally and carefully designed and prepared it to support living creatures. And that’s an analogy for our universe. “Over the past thirty years or so, scientists have discovered that just about everything about the basic structure of the universe is balanced on a razor’s edge for life to exist. The coincidences are far fantastic to attribute this to mere chance or to claim that it needs no explanation. The dials are set too precisely to have been a random accident. Somebody, as Fred Hoyle quipped, has been monkeying with the physics.”

Let’s look at one example, gravity. Imagine a ruler, or one of those old-fashioned linear radio dials, that goes all the way across the universe. It would be broken down into one-inch increments, which means there would be billions upon billions upon billions of inches. The entire dial represents the range of force strengths in nature, with gravity being the weakest force and the strong nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons together in the nuclei being the strongest, a whopping ten thousand billion billion billion billion times stronger than gravity.  The range of possible settings for the force of gravity can plausibly be taken to be at least as large as the total range of force strengths. Now, let’s imagine that you want to move the dial from where it’s currently set. Even if you were to move it by only one inch, the impact on life in the universe would be catastrophic. That small adjustment of the dial would increase gravity by a billion-fold.

There are many more examples of the universe being fine-tuned. Check out this article from the Discovery Institute on fine tuning.

Find the Truth and remember…. Have an Intelligent Faith!!

-Nelis

NEW SERIES: "QUESTION OF THE WEEK BY DR. WLLIAM LANE CRAIG"

Today we will be starting a new series called "Question of the Week" by Dr William Lane Craig. We will be posting questions that people send to Dr. Craig on his website reasonablefaith.org.

Please check out his website for more that 250 previous questions and answers.

Here's this weeks question:


Dear Dr.Craig

I want to start off by thanking you for what you’ve done for Christianity and for Jesus both in your written work and all through out your career.

However I do still have a two Questions regarding the nature of evolution and God’s role to play.

Q1) Stephen Meyer who is an American scholar, philosopher of biology and advocate for intelligent design says, “Evolution is a purposeless undirected process no one not even God can direct an undirected process or give purpose to a purposeless process.” He also has called theistic evolution is Oxymoron. And yet he is not alone amoung many biologists theres a trend to think like this in the United States. A 2009 poll by Pew Research Center found that “87%” of scientists say evolution is due to natural processes, such as natural selection genetic drift and random mutation. And so does that really bother your theism?

Q2) If you do accept evolution at what point did humans become human?
Did God sort of intervene in this point of history were he decided this creature is speacial? Because in evolution a species is always the same as its parent there is no one time in the history of any species where you can say “thats a new species.” why did God favour this one creaure As opposed to the very similar
Homo sapiens heidelbergensis,
Homo sapiens neanderthalensis,
Homo floresiensis,
Homo habilis,
Homo georgicus,
Homo erectus,
Homo ergaster,
Homo antecessor etc.
Many of these displayed human like behaviour and may have asked the ‘why’ question also.
So does that bother your theism either?

Andrew
United Kingdom

Dr. Craig responds:

Please click HERE to see Dr. Craig's response.

For  more questions of the week check out Dr. Craig's website reasonablefaith.org and if you have any questions you can email me or pastor J at intelligentfaith315@gmail.com or jason@claycup.com.

There is nothing wrong with asking questions, there is if you don't ask!!!

SERIES: "Good Arguments for God's Existence - The Cosmological Argument (Leibniz)" - pt.2

"Why does anything exist at all, as opposed to nothing?"

"Is there an explanation for every being that exists?"

This is the fundamental question, many say, to all of philosophy.  It also happens to be the primary question that  Leibniz attempted to answer as he formed his version of the Cosmological Argument.  Who is "Leibniz", you may ask?

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz  (July 1, 1646 – November 14, 1716) was a German mathematician and philosopher. He wrote in different languages, primarily in Latin , French and German.

Leibniz occupies a prominent place in the history of mathematics and the history of philosophy. He developed the infinitesimal calculus independently of Isaac Newton, and Leibniz's mathematical notation has been widely used ever since it was published. He became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal's calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685 and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in the arithmometer, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary number system, which is at the foundation of virtually all digital computers. 

Leibniz made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology, linguistics, and information science. He wrote works on politics, law, ethics, theology, history, philosophy, and philology. Leibniz's contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters, and in unpublished manuscripts. As of 2011, there is no complete gathering of the writings of Leibniz.

In the field of philosophy, one of the greatest accomplishments of this great Christian man, is the Cosmological Argument for God's existence, based upon finding a sufficient explanation for the universe.  It proceeds in this fashion:

1. Everything that exists has an explanation, either in the necessity of it's own nature, or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the explanation of the universe is God.

Does this argument make sense?  Is it coherent?  Does it contain logical errors?  

Watch and find out..........

Series - "Icons of Evolution, Darwin's Tree of Life, Molecular Phylogeny"

A phylogeny is the evolutionary history of a group of organisms. All living organisms, from bacteria to humans, contain DNA.  A DNA molecule is a long chain consisting of various combinations of four subunits, abbreviated A, T, C and G; and the order of these subunits specifies the sequence of amino acids in an organism's proteins. During reproduction, the sequence of subunits is copied from one DNA molecule to another, but molecular accidents, or mutations, sometimes make the copy slightly different from the parent molecule. Therefore, organisms may have DNA molecules (and thus proteins) that differ somewhat from the DNA and proteins of their ancestors.

In 1962 biologists Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling suggested that comparisons of DNA sequences and their protein products could be used to determine how closely organisms are related. Organisms whose DNA or proteins differ by only a few subunits are presumably more closely related in evolutionary terms than those which differ by more. If mutations have accumulated steadily over time, the number of differences between organisms can serve as a "molecular clock" indicating how many years have passed since their DNA or protein was identical-that is, how long ago they shared a common ancestor.

Comparing DNA sequences is simple in theory, but complex in practice. Since an actual segment of DNA may contain thousands of subunits, lining them up to start a comparison is itself a tricky task, and different alignments can give very different results. Nevertheless, conclusions drawn from molecular comparisons have been brought to bear on the Cambrian explosion.

Molecular phylogeny and the Cambrian explosion

Did the animal phyla originate abruptly in the Cambrian, as the fossils seem to indicate, or did they slowly diverge from a common ancestor millions of years before, as Darwin's theory implies? It's not possible to analyze DNA from Cambrian fossils, but molecular biologists are able to compare protein and DNA sequences in living species. Assuming that sequence differences among the major animal phyla are due to mutations, and that mutations accumulate at the same rate in various organisms over long periods of time, biologists use sequence differences as a "molecular clock" to estimate how long ago the phyla shared a common ancestor.

 It turns out that the dates obtained by this method cover a wide range. Bruce Runnegar started the bidding in 1982 with an estimate of 900-1000 million years for the initial divergence of the animal phyla. In 1996 Russell Doolittle and his colleagues proposed a date of 670 million years, while Gregory Wray and his colleagues proposed 1200 million. In 1997 Richard Fortey and his colleagues endorsed the older date, and in 1998 Francisco Ayala and his colleagues endorsed the younger. But these two dates represent a spread of 530 million years, or as much time as has elapsed between the Cambrian explosion and the present. This "range of divergence estimates," in the opinion of American geneticist Kenneth Halanych, testifies "against the ability to date such ancient events" using molecular methods.

So the Cambrian explosion remains a paradox. The fossil evidence shows that the major animal phyla and classes appeared right at the start, contradicting a major tenet of Darwin's theory. Molecular phylogeny has not resolved the paradox, because the dates inferred from it vary over such a wide range.

The failure of molecular phylogeny to resolve the paradox now appears to be part of a larger problem. Since the early 1970s, evolutionary biologists have been hoping that sequence comparisons would overcome many of the difficulties arising from more traditional approaches, and would enable them to construct a "universal tree of life" based on molecules alone. Recent discoveries, however, have dashed that hope.

The growing problem in molecular phylogeny

Modern versions of the Darwinian tree of life are called "phylogenetic trees" In a typical phylogenetic tree, the "root" is the common ancestor of all the other organisms in the tree. The lower branches represent lineages that diverged relatively early, while the upper branches diverged later. The tips of the branches are actual species. Wherever two branches diverge, the branch-point indicates the hypothetical common ancestor of the two branching lineages. Many phylogenetic trees are drawn so that the lengths of the branches are proportional to sequence differences, which are often assumed to indicate how much time has elapsed since lineages diverged.

It is important to remember that the only actual data in a phylogenetic tree (with rare exceptions) come from living organisms, which are the tips of the branches. Everything else about a phylogenetic tree is hypothetical. Ideally, phylogenetic trees should be approximately the same regardless of which molecules are chosen for comparison. Indeed, there has been a general expectation among evolutionary biologists that the more molecules they include in a phylogenetic analysis, the more reliable their results are likely to be. But the expectation that more data would help matters "began to crumble a decade ago," wrote University of California molecular biologists James Lake, Ravi Jain, and Maria Rivera in 1999, "when scientists started analyzing a variety of genes from different organisms and found that their relationships to each other contradicted the evolutionary tree of life derived from rRNA analysis alone." According to French biologists Herve Philippe and Patrick Forterre: "With more and more sequences available, it turned out that most protein phylogenies contradict each other as well as the rRNA tree." In other words, different molecules lead to very different phylogenetic trees. According to University of Illinois biologist Carl Woese, an early pioneer in constructing rRNA-based phylogenetic trees: "No consistent organismal phylogeny has emerged from the many individual protein phylogenies so far produced. Phylogenetic incongruities can be seen everywhere in the universal tree, from its root to the major branching within and among the various [groups] to the makeup of the primary groupings themselves."

Inconsistencies among trees based on different molecules, and the bizarre trees that result from some molecular analyses, have now plunged molecular phylogeny into a crisis.

Jonathan Wells, author of the book we are busy studying, is a senior fellow at the discovery institute. Here is a link to an article from the discovery institute about the Cambrian Explosion. 

Cambrian Explosion

Have an Intelligent Faith!!

-Nelis

NEW SERIES COMING SOON!!

This Wednesday we will be starting a new series featuring Dr. William Lane Craig. From his website reasonablefaith.org we will be posting a "question of the week". Here is some more info about Dr. Craig:

William Lane Craig (born August 23, 1949) is an American analytic philosopher, philosophical theologian, and Christian apologist. He is known for his work on the philosophy of time and the philosophy of religion, specifically the existence of God and the defense of Christian theism. He has made major contributions to the philosophy of religion, and his defense of the Kalām cosmological argument is the most widely discussed argument for the existence of God in contemporary Western philosophy. He has authored or edited over 30 books including The Kalam Cosmological Argument (1979), Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology (co-authored with Quentin Smith, 1993), Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (2001), and Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (co-edited with Quentin Smith, 2007).

So remember to stop by on Wednesdays the get to know Dr. Craig better.

Have an Intelligent Faith!!

-Nelis

SERIES: "Ancient Non-Christian Historical Evidence for Jesus of Nazareth - Thallus & Pliny"

"Is there any historical reference to the darkness and earthquake that happened during the Crucifixion of Jesus?

"Did the Roman Emperors ever have correspondence 

concerning Christ?"

In today's video, we will be looking at what two interesting Roman citizens, Thallus (Roman Historian, 52 AD) and also Pliny the Younger (Roman Governor, 112 AD), had to say concerning the historical personage of Jesus of Nazareth.

Some interesting features of these 2 non-christian historical sources are that one of them mentions the darkness over the land and the earthquake that happened during the crucifixion of Christ, while the other is a direct correspondence with the most powerful man on the planet at that time in history, Emperor Trajan.

I hope this information is educational, answers any questions you may have, and strengthens your faith in the veracity and historicity of the Christian worldview.

Until next time.... have and Intelligent Faith!

- Pastor J. 

Series: "The Case for a Creator, THE EVIDENCE OF COSMOLOGY: BEGINNING WITH A BANG"

Set aside the many competing explanations of the Big Bang; something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization—that something transcendent started it all—which has hard-science types . . . using terms like ‘miracle.’ Journalist Gregg Easterbrook

Perhaps the best argument . . . that the Big Bang supports theism is the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At times this has led to scientific ideas . . . being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory. Astrophysicist C. J. Isham

Where Did Everything Come From?

Thousands of years ago, the Hebrews believed they had the answer: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” opens the Bible.  Everything began, they claimed, with the primordial fiat lux—the voice of God commanding light into existence. But is that a simplistic superstition or a divinely inspired insight? What do the cosmologists—scientists who devote their lives to studying the origin of the universe—have to say about the issue?

“In the beginning there was an explosion,” explained Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg in his book The First Three Minutes.

“In three minutes,” wrote Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything, “ninety-eight percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.”

KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

“In ancient Greece, Aristotle believed that God isn’t the Creator of the universe but that he simply imbues order into it. In his view, both God and the universe are eternal. Of course, that contradicted the Hebrew notion that God created the world out of nothing. So Christians later sought to refute Aristotle. One prominent Christian philosopher on the topic was John Philoponus of Alexandria, Egypt, who lived in the fourth century. He argued that the universe had a beginning. “When Islam took over North Africa, Muslim theologians picked up these arguments, because they also believed in creation. So while this tradition was lost to the Christian West, it began to be highly developed within Islamic medieval theology. One of the most famous Muslim proponents was al-Ghazali, who lived from 1058 to 1111. “These arguments eventually got passed back into Latin-speaking Christendom through the mediation of Jewish thinkers, who lived side-by-side with Muslim theologians, particularly in Spain, which at that time had been conquered by the Muslims. They became hotly debated.

“One of the most remarkable features of the kalam argument is that it gives us more than just a transcendent cause of the universe. It also implies a personal Creator.”

 “How do you frame the kalam argument?”

“As formulated by al-Ghazali, the argument has three simple steps: ‘Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause.’ Then you can do a conceptual analysis of what it means to be a cause of the universe, and a striking number of divine attributes can be identified.”

Here Dr. William Lane Craig explaining the Kalam argument.The 1st is part one, and the 2nd is part 2

 

“How do we really know that the universe started at some point in the past?”

There are two pathways toward establishing it. One could be called either mathematical or philosophical, while the other is scientific.

Mathematical

The early Christian and Muslim scholars used mathematical reasoning to demonstrate that it was impossible to have an infinite past. Their conclusion, therefore, was that the universe’s age must be finite—that is, it must have had a beginning. Here is an explanation of this:

“Imagine I had an infinite number of marbles in my possession, and that I wanted to give you some. In fact, suppose I wanted to give you an infinite number of marbles. One way I could do that would be to give you the entire pile of marbles. In that case I would have zero marbles left for myself. “However, another way to do it would be to give you all of the odd numbered marbles. Then I would still have an infinity left over for myself, and you would have an infinity too. You’d have just as many as I would—and, in fact, each of us would have just as many as I originally had before we divided into odd and even! Or another approach would be for me to give you all of the marbles numbered four and higher. That way, you would have an infinity of marbles, but I would have only three marbles left. “What these illustrations demonstrate is that the notion of an actual infinite number of things leads to contradictory results. In the first case in which I gave you all the marbles, infinity minus infinity is zero; in the second case in which I gave you all the odd-numbered marbles, infinity minus infinity is infinity; and in the third case in which I gave you all the marbles numbered four and greater, infinity minus infinity is three. In each case, we have subtracted the identical number from the identical number, but we have come up with nonidentical results"

Scientific

Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1915 and started applying it to the universe as a whole, he was shocked to discover it didn’t allow for a static universe. According to his equations, the universe should either be exploding or imploding. 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light coming to us from distant galaxies appears to be redder than it should be, and that this is a universal feature of galaxies in all parts of the sky. Hubble explained this red shift as being due to the fact that the galaxies are moving away from us. He concluded that the universe is literally flying apart at enormous velocities.

If you believe in Creation or the Big Bang the evidence is clear that the universe had a beginning. The problem the scientists have with Big Bang is where did it all come from?

Have an Intelligent Faith!!

-Nelis