CADRE Comments

In what should now be regarded as a classic of atheist literature, The Blind Watchmaker , Richard Dawkins famously argued that because theism as a proposed explanation for complexity is self-defeating, it follows that the extremely improbable but at least naturalistic event of abiogenesis followed by eons of cumulative natural selection is the only satisfactory explanation for the origin and diversity of life. As he put it, "To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer."[1] In other words, to infer God as best explanation for nature is question begging, and therefore nature must be its own best explanation. This amounts to the old "Who Created God?" objection.   There are many fallacies in this superficially clever argument, beginning with a non sequitur based on the argument from ignorance. Even if theism were somehow shown to be ...

This week, I will report about some commentaries that deal with Matthew 24. And, once again, a Douglas Hamp article is my inspiration: http://www.douglashamp.com/the-fig-tree-has-budded/ Matthew 24:32 has this verse: Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When it’s branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, you know that summer is nigh. Douglas Hamp believes that the Fig Tree is the house of Israel: There are two obvious questions concerning this parable: who or what is the fig tree and how long is a generation? The answer to the first question is unmistakably Israel. God clearly compares Israel with a fig tree. The following verses are given in chronological order: “I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness; I saw your fathers as the first fruits on the fig tree in its first season.” (Hosea 9:10, emphasis mine). Here God compares Israel to grapes and the fathers to fruits of the fig tree. Then in Joel He speaks of “my land” as being comparable to “my fig tree...

Herbert Marcuse   (1898-1979)  warned of rise of one-dimensional  man C. Wright Mills was a sociologist at Columbia University in New York. He is best known for his work  The Power Elite. [16]  It is from that work that we take the popular phrase of the 1960s, “military industrial complex.” In  The Sociological Imagination [17]  he explodes the illusions by which the power elite cover their own lack of understanding. His message there is that not only does the system run over the individual but even those who are in charge of it are dragged along by its momentum and don’t really know where they are going. Mills was one of the first thinkers to use the term "post-modern" (which he hyphenated). For Mills, writing in the '50s, modernity had already passed away, post-modernity had dawned. "The ideological mark...[of the post-modern epoch] --that which sets it apart from the modern age-- is that the ideas of freedom and of reason have...