CADRE Comments

This quote was on Theology Web recently, it's obvously an atheist. But I can't find the url or the thread at all. nevertheless I think the quite is general enough it doesn't matter who said it. This encapsulates the basic atheist desire for scientific proof of God. I kind of like the way I answer this: Unknown Atheist (every atheist): Scientific evidence is not faith. Science is not faith based. Why doesn't God show Himself or give scientific evidence for His existence? because according to the skeptics, it would be pointless for God to do so, since scientific evidence is not faith, and that is what God wants us to have, faith. The demand for scientific evidence of God is a self defeating one, the lack of scientific evidence for God is actually evidence of His existence. Metacrock: The questions that science poses and the questions that religious belief pose are totally different sorts of questions. There are points of overlap. Most of these stem form the ages...

Occasionally an atheist or skeptic will tell me, after countless rounds of argumentation, that I still haven't provided so much as a "shred of evidence" that God exists. At that point I usually leave off my part in the discussion, knowing that I have more than met my responsibility as a Christian witness. I post this only to remind Christian apologists (me included) that we are charged to be wise with our use of time and energy:   As Christians, we believe that God is quite capable of revealing himself to humanity. Moreover we maintain that he has actually done so, through various forms of evidence.* These include the precise fine-tuning of the universe for life, the specifiable complexity of living organisms, universal human awareness of moral responsibility, the prophetic history of Israel, religious experience, and of course the miraculous ministry, crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Atheists, on the other hand, often argue that God is not only unknowa...

This week, I decided to talk a little about the Higgs Boson, which was inspired by this link and discussion that Joe is having with Eric Sotnak: http://metacrock.blogspot.com/2016/05/fine-tuning-fine-tuning-argument.html In the comments, something that Eric said caught my eye: According to the best models we have of Quantum Mechanics, events in the very early universe were truly random. I asked Joe about this, and he said something about how they can have causes even if they are random, and about how you can’t look at sub-atomic particles and say if they are un-caused or not. This brought be back to the Higgs Boson concept that I heard about before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson The Higgs Boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the quantum excitation of the Higgs Field -- a fundamental field of crucial importance to particle physics theory. In the last few years, Joe and Joel from Evolution by Design did blog entries on thi...

If you recall last time I posted a prolegomena to an argument from laws of nature. In other words, an argument for existence of God based upon laws of physics and nature. That article was just thinking getting ready to make such an argument, Here I am making it. I encourage the reader to go back and read the article fist if you haven't already. The point is two fold:  the folks on Secular Outpost were so dubious of any such argument  and the presentation that set them off so deserved their ire (designed by Campus Crusade for Christ ) [1 ], that I felt like I had to try to (a) prove to the atheists there is a potential argument there and show my fellow Christians how to find it, at to offer  direction in which to move. The bad argument on the website was purely a "god of the gaps" argument: How is it that we can identify laws of nature that   never   change? Why is the universe so orderly, so reliable?"The greatest scientists have been...

Years ago, when I began debating the truth of Christianity, skeptics would occasionally attack my viewpoint by asserting that if I hadn’t examined all of the other religions of the world I couldn’t know that Christianity was true. According to the members of this group (whom I will hereinafter call Theological Travel Agents), I couldn’t possibly know whether Christianity was the best religion unless I had scoured the entire religious and philosophical landscape looking under every rock and bush to see whether there might be something more worthy of belief buried in that vast religious/intellectual landscape. Certainly, there is some truth to the notion that unless one searches beyond what is ordinary in her experience she may miss something that is vastly superior to what she believed to be true prior to obtaining additional data. For example, when I grew up in the Midwest, I thought I knew what foods were good to eat and which weren’t. But when I later moved to California and st...

    One of my more philosophically reflective coworkers asked me this question not long ago:   "If you were to clone a human, (lets say it’s possible) would that copy have a soul?"   That led to a brief discussion in which we were both reminded of Swampman , a thought experiment by philosopher Donald Davidson. Imagine, suggests Donaldson, that a man is hiking in the woods when a storm hits and a bolt of lightning strikes and kills him. At the very same moment, another bolt of lightning strikes a swamp nearby and as a result a creature is formed that just happens to be chemically, genetically indistinguishable to the first man in every respect. He is, not just a copy, but exactly identical to the man who died nearby in every measurable physical respect, down to the last molecule. Davidson used Swampman to explore questions of personal identity and causal history.    Now my short answer to the soul question is "yes." The soul is that part...

  In “Can a Machine have a Soul?” Bill Lauritzen claims to have disproved the soul. [1] He’s considering the issue of weather or not transferring human consciousness into a machine would give the machine a soul? His solution is to disprove that humans have souls then there’s no soul to worry about. In my view the soul is a symbol and it’s the spirit that lives on after death. So there’s no question of proving or disproving the soul since there is no question or proving or disproving symbols. For the sake of this issue I’ll use his terminology. He assumes the soul is the thing that lives. After all, he would make the same argument against the spirit. That argument is made by the bogus method of merely assume what he thinks human ancestors must have thought about after life and what they based it on. Basing it on something we know is false such as an literalized analogy between smoke is the afterlife of fire, and breath sustaining life, being like smoke, theref...