Christian Apologetics -- providing a reasoned defense of the Christian message.
Promoting and contrasting the Christian worldview with atheism, secularism, postmodernism, skepticism, Islam, humanism and all other isms that raise their heads against the knowledge of God.
Here are the Oxford MP3s and videos featuring Tim Keller and Mike Cain. Including…
A must-read for budding and established apologists here:
All of these trends have awakened a sleeping giant – Christian apologetics, or the defense of the faith. We’re seeing apologetics books on the New York Times bestsellers list. Schools like Biola University and its Talbot School of Theology, which are leaders in apologetics, are filled to capacity. Denver Seminary is launching a new degree in Christian Apologetics and Ethics this fall. One organization is seeking to place apologists on 500 college campuses in the next five years.
Get it here: www.thebestschools.org/blog/2012/01/14/william-dembski-interview/
I love Dembski. He is an intellectual genius, and honest to the heart. With the persecution he has faced both inside and outside the church, he is also like a modern Galileo.
www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10771297
Incredible.
Also:
Eight of 10 believe Jesus was a real person who lived 2000 years ago.
Incredible #2!
And I thought the only people crazy enough to deny the solid historical facts about Jesus were the atheists on the infidels website.
It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, ‘proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer’.
Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.
Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it.
It was cited uncritically by, among others, reporters and commentators from the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian, The Economist and numerous media outlets in America.
The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a sceptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’.
But today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.
Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.
Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.
Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago.
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk
From here.
Further to “Dawkins speaks: Why he won’t debate William Lane Craig … Craig advocates “ genocide”
In “Richard Dawkins is either a fool or a coward for refusing to debate William Lane Craig” (The Telegraph, October 21, 2011), historian Tim Stanley offers,
He likes to pick fights either with dunces (like the deliciously silly and obviously gay Ted Haggard) or with incredibly nice old Christians with no fire in their belly (like Rowan Williams). Dawkins has gotten away with his illiterate, angry schtick for so many years because his opponents have been so woolly. This is a damning indictment not only of him, but of the clerical establishment of Great Britain. But this time, he understood that he was up against a pro. In America, evangelicals have to compete in a vibrant, competitive marketplace of different denominations. That breeds the very guile and theatricality that are so sorely lacking among the Anglican clergy. In Craig, Dawkins met his match. Like Jonah, he was confronted by the truth and he ran away.
Stanley provides critical context for Craig’s treatment of Old Testament slaughters.
Craig’s purpose in writing this piece is to unravel the paradox of a moral Bible that also includes lashings of apparently random violence. Craig stresses that these passages of the Bible are difficult for us to read because we are not of the age in which they are written – they are just as alien to us as Beowulf or the Iliad. That’s because Christian society has been shaped by the rules of life outlined in the New Testament, not in the section of The Bible in which this massacre occurs. Far from using this passage to celebrate the slaughter of heathen, Craig is making the point that the revelation of God’s justice has changed over time.
Which is pretty much the standard view.
It’s hard to figure out why Dawkins, who holds forth regularly on religion, would not know that. Or …
Bill Craig is heading to the UK to intellectually defend the existence of God. Here goes…
Dr. William Lane Craig has been asked to lecture across the United Kingdom – the first opportunity to do so in four years! Presenting the case for the truth of the Christian faith to thousands of students at such prestigious institutions as Cambridge University and Oxford is a special blessing as these students that may otherwise never hear Christianity thoughtfully defended.
Cambridge and Oxford are “home base” to the authors of two of the most popular books casting doubt on the existence of God today: Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Dawkins has refused numerous requests to debate Craig, so Bill will instead present an intelligent and gracious answer the charges levied in The God Delusion before a packed house of listeners eager to hear an alternate view.
That’s why we need friends like you to help support Reasonable Faith and the truth of the Gospel on today’s college campuses in the U.K., the U.S., and across the globe. Our campuses are battlegrounds of spiritual warfare and we must be diligent to not leave an “empty chair” in place of Christian ideas.
Your support will also help underwrite the translation of www.ReasonableFaith.org into Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese. This is a top priority for us, as these are three of the most widely spoken languages worldwide, and we continue to receive requests from international students who need more materials in their own language.
Can you stand with us today by making a secure online gift now? And please pray for God’s hand upon Dr. Craig as he strikes out on the Reasonable Faith Tour in the UK this October.
Thank you for your continued support!
John Herring, President
Reasonable Faith
New Certificate, CEU Credits, Annual Report, and The Story of Jesus Speaks!
Dear Friends,
Lots of things are happening at BiblicalTraining. Here are the highlights.
NEW CERTIFICATE
Christians in the Marketplace is a 10 hour certificate taught by Dr. Gerry Breshears and Kent Humphreys and is offered by Western Seminary and BiblicalTraining. It addresses the issue of how do business leaders apply biblical principles to their leadership and interaction with others in the marketplace in such a way that Christ is glorified and men and women are born into the Kingdom of God.
CEU CREDITS AT BIBLICALTRAINING
BiblicalTraining has been certified by ACSI so that we can offer versions of the Certificates for Continuing Education Units. Check out our offerings.
THE STORY OF JESUS SPEAKS
This is our translation of the Gospel of John specifically for seekers and new believers. A friend has just recorded the translation so you can listen to the Story as well as read it.
ANNUAL REPORT
You can download a copy of our Annual Report 2010. It will give you a snapshot of where we are, where we are going, and some financial numbers.
For His Glory,
Bill Mounce
P.S. Response to our last newsletter about helping the Chinese house church system was strong. Please pray for wisdom as we put a core curriculum together for them and all bi-vocational pastors around the world. Thanks to all who are helping with the transcriptions. And please, when school starts in a few weeks, remember to start your Amazon purchases at BiblicalTraining.org.
A snippet from an article by Peter Hitchens, brother of “new atheist” Christopher Hitchens:
So yes, I am deeply sorry for the innocent and gentle people who have lost lives, homes, businesses and security. Heaven knows I have argued for years for the measures that might have saved them.
But I am not really very sorry for the elite liberal Londoners who have suddenly discovered what millions of others have lived with for decades. The mass criminality in the big cities is merely a speeded-up and concentrated version of life on most large estates – fear, intimidation, cruelty, injustice, savagery towards the vulnerable and the different, a cold sneer turned towards any plea for pity, the awful realisation that when you call for help from the authorities, none will come.
Just look and see how many shops are protected with steel shutters, how many homes have bars on their windows. This is not new.
As the polluted flood (it is not a tide; it will not go back down again) of spite, greed and violence washes on to their very doorsteps, well-off and influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created, and which they ignored when it did not affect them personally.
No doubt they will find ways to save themselves. But they will not save the country. Because even now they will not admit that all their ideas are wrong, and that the policies of the past 50 years – the policies they love – have been a terrible mistake. I have heard them in the past few days clinging to their old excuses of non-existent ‘poverty’ and ‘exclusion’.
Take our Prime Minister, who is once again defrauding far too many people. He uses his expensive voice, his expensive clothes, his well-learned tone of public-school command, to give the impression of being an effective and decisive person. But it is all false. He has no real idea of what to do. He thinks the actual solutions to the problem are ‘fascist’. Deep down, he still wants to ‘understand’ the hoodies.
Say to him that naughty children should be smacked at home and caned in school, that the police (and responsible adults) should be free to wallop louts and vandals caught in the act, that the police should return to preventive foot patrols, that prisons should be austere places of hard work, plain food and discipline without TV sets or semi-licit drugs, and that wrongdoers should be sent to them when they first take to crime, not when they are already habitual crooks, and he will throw up his well-tailored arms in horror at your barbarity.
Say to him that divorce should be made very difficult and that the state should be energetically in favour of stable, married families with fathers (and cease forthwith to subsidise families without fathers) and he will smirk patronisingly and regard you as a pitiable lunatic.
Say to him that mass immigration should be stopped and reversed, and that those who refuse any of the huge number of jobs which are then available should be denied benefits of any kind, and he will gibber in shock.
From Melanie Phillips at MailOnline:
So now the chickens have well and truly come home terrifyingly to roost. The violent anarchy that has taken hold of British cities is the all-too-predictable outcome of a three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value.
The married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of the drugs laws and many more fundamental conventions were all smashed by a liberal intelligentsia hell-bent on a revolutionary transformation of society.
Those of us who warned over the years that they were playing with fire were sneered at and smeared as Right-wing nutters who wanted to turn the clock back to some mythical golden age.
Indeed, “The riots have been fuelled by moral collapse”…
When Labour came to power in 1997, it set about systematically destroying not just the traditional family but the very idea that married parents were better for children than any other arrangement.
Instead, it introduced the sexual free-for-all of ‘lifestyle choice’; claimed that the idea of the male breadwinner was a sexist anachronism; and told girls that they could, and should, go it alone as mothers.
This was the outcome of the shattering defeat of Tony Blair, in the two years or so after he came to power, at the hands of the ultra-feminists and apostles of non-judgmentalism in his Cabinet and party who were determined, above all, to destroy the traditional nuclear family.
Blair stood virtually alone against them, and lost.
One of these ultra-feminist wreckers was Harriet Harman. The other night, she was on TV preposterously suggesting that cuts in educational allowances or youth workers had something to do with young people torching and looting shops, robbing and leaving people for dead in the streets.
But Harman was one of the principal forces in the Labour government behind the promotion of lone parenthood and the marginalisation of fathers. If anyone should be blamed for bringing about the conditions which have led to these appalling scenes in our cities, it is surely Ms Harman.
And this breaking of the family was further condoned, rewarded and encouraged by the Welfare State, which conceives of need solely in terms of absence of money, and which accordingly subsidises lone parenthood and the destructive behaviour that fatherlessness brings in its train.
And finally a challenge:
When church leaders stop prattling like soft-headed social workers and start preaching, once again, the moral concepts that underlie our civilisation, and when our political leaders decide to oppose the culture war that has been waged against that civilisation rather than supinely acquiescing in its destruction, then — and only then — will we start to get to grips with this terrible problem.
Until then, within the smouldering embers of our smashed and burned-out cities, we can only look upon the ruins of the Britain we have so dearly loved; the Britain that once led the world towards civilisation, but is now so tragically leading the way out.
Much profound thinking from Justin Taylor:
C.S. Lewis, in his prophetic The Abolition of Man (1943):
And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for these very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
Brad Green comments:
. . . A culture—the UK or otherwise—cannot generation after generation laugh at honour and virtue and then be surprised that a culture has produced people who have no interest in honor or virtue. The most foundational question is not, “what caused these riots?”, but rather, “why are there not more riots?” That is, a culture that systematically and repeatedly and thoroughly laughs at virute and honor should not be surprised when they look up to see traitors in their midst. We cannot make “men without chests” and then be surprised to see them face-to-face. May God help the UK, and all of us.
See also Theodore Dalrymple’s comments in The Spectactor:
I doubt there are many people who have never in their lives experienced the pleasure of inflicting some kind of pain on others, physical or mental, from sheer malice and delight in doing so. It is an urge that we overcome first by effort and then by habit.
It is one of the tasks of civilisation to tame our inherent savagery. But who, contemplating contemporary British culture, would recognise in it any civilising influence, or rather fail to recognise its opposite? It is a constant call to and celebration of degradation, not only physical but spiritual and emotional. A culture in which Amy Winehouse, with her militant vulgarity and self-indulgent stupidity, combined with a very minor talent, could be so extravagantly admired and feted, is not one to put up strong barriers against our baser instincts, desires and urges. On the contrary, that culture has long been a celebration of those very urges. He who pays the savage never gets rid of the savagery; and this is only the beginning.
From The Guardian:
Archaeopteryx, supposedly the oldest and most primitive bird on Earth, might not have been a bird after all, scientists say.
The controversial claim, if confirmed, is something of a bombshell for researchers who have viewed the evolution of birds and feathered flight through the lens of the species since it was discovered 150 years ago.
The finding leaves palaeontologists in the awkward position of having to identify another creature as the oldest and original avian on which to base the story of birdlife.
Mmmmmm. Gotta love David Berlinski:
Before you can ask ‘Is Darwinian theory correct or not?’, You have to ask the preliminary question ‘Is it clear enough so that it could be correct?’. That’s a very different question. One of my prevailing doctrines about Darwinian theory is ‘Man, that thing is just a mess. It’s like looking into a room full of smoke.’ Nothing in the theory is precisely, clearly, carefully defined or delineated. It lacks all of the rigor one expects from mathematical physics, and mathematical physics lacks all the rigor one expects from mathematics. So we’re talking about a gradual descent down the level of intelligibility until we reach evolutionary biology. – from Expelled April 18 2008 29.33.
Yeah, it’s just not real science.
I have listened to Andrew Fellows’ lecture on epistemology about 10 times and I still get stuff out of it — and it drives me crazy. His various lectures can be found on BeThinking’s website and L’Abri’s website. He also has a PDF document Culture of Narcissis here.
Introduction
This paper is an attempt to show that the modern person is in the grip of a new psychological consciousness – one that is extremely pre-occupied with the self. We have become a culture of Narcissism. I have given a perspective as I see it from a European point of view.
An ancient story from Greek mythology provides a door into the world of the narcissist. It centres on a very handsome young man called Narcissus. So attractive was this man that all the girls fell in love with him. He was aware of his charms and this made him arrogant and proud. Despite the efforts of the ladies to win his affections he ignored their overtures. One was especially attracted to him and did everything she could to win his attention. She too failed in her attempts. So desperate was she to win him that she prayed to a goddess that Narcissus would respond favourably. There was no answer. Finally with a broken heart she prayed that he would learn as she had what it was like to experience unrequited love. To this prayer there was an answer. One day as Narcissus was walking through the forest he stumbled upon a clear pool of water. As he knelt to drink – for he was very thirsty – the loveliest sight that had ever appeared captivated his attention. He immediately fell in love. So great was his attraction that he could not leave the pool and his appetite vanished. Before long his health deteriorated and he began to fade. In the end he died staring at this image in the pool – striving the embrace the one object of his desire – himself.
Epistemology MP3 lectures, parts 1, 2, and 3:
Epistemology 1 by Andrew Fellows
Epistemology 2 by Andrew Fellows
Epistemology 3 by Andrew Fellows
You can access all of Andrew Fellows’ MP3s by going to this page and entering “Fellows, Andrew” into the author field. Here is a list of titles:
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