Category: Reasonable Answers to Honest Questions

I noticed some­thing odd when I was read­ing some news recent­ly: [in response to claims of nigh-immor­tal­i­ty for humans in the near future] Out­side the con­fer­ence, many sci­en­tists who spe­cial­ize in aging are skep­ti­cal of such claims and say the human body is just not designed to last past about 120 years. Even with health­i­er lifestyles and less dis­ease, they say fail­ure of the brain and oth­er organs will even­tu­al­ly con­demn all humans.[source]

120 years? Inter­est­ing…

Then the LORD said, “My Spir­it will not put up with humans for such a long time, for they are only mor­tal flesh. In the future, they will live no more than 120 years.” Gen­e­sis 6:3, NLT

Noth­ing con­clu­sive here (we’re not talk­ing about data pub­lished in a peer-reviewed jour­nal or any­thing), but I did think it was wor­thy of com­ment.

It is some­times alleged that the Bible does­n’t real­ly claim that Jesus is God. This is a list of pas­sages that estab­lish the doc­trine. This list isn’t writ­ten to per­suade non­be­liev­ers that Jesus is in fact God, but to per­suade every­one that the Bible indeed claims that He is.

Pas­sages That Explic­it­ly Assert Jesus’ Divin­i­ty

• In the begin­ning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
  Word was God. (John 1:1, NIV)
• No one has ever seen God. But his only Son, who is him­self God,
  is near to the Father’s heart; he has told us about him. (John 1:18, NLT)
• Then he said to Thomas, “Put your fin­ger here; see my hands. Reach out your
  hand and put it into my side. Stop doubt­ing and believe.” Thomas said
  to him, “My Lord and my God!” Then Jesus told him, “Because you have
  seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have
  believed.” (John 20:27–29, NIV)
• Keep watch over your­selves and all the flock of which the Holy Spir­it has
  made you over­seers. Be shep­herds of the church of God, which he bought
  with his own blood. (Acts 20:28, NIV)
• Theirs are the patri­archs, and from them is traced the human ances­try of
  Christ, who is God over all, for­ev­er praised! Amen. (Romans
  9:5, NIV)
• …we wait for the blessed hope—the glo­ri­ous appear­ing of our great
  God and Sav­ior, Jesus Christ, who gave him­self for us to redeem us
  from all wicked­ness and to puri­fy for him­self a peo­ple that are his very own,
  eager to do what is good. (Titus 2:13–14, NIV)
• …to those who through the right­eous­ness of our God and Sav­ior Jesus
  Christ have received a faith as pre­cious as ours… (2 Peter 1:1, NIV)

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Does The Bible Teach That Jesus Is God?”

In the cum­ber­some­ly-titled arti­cle Sup­port For Authen­tic­i­ty of The Book of Matthew Comes From An Unlike­ly Source, you can learn how archaelogical/historical finds are increas­ing our con­fi­dence in the bib­li­cal text.

One of the first Gospels to be doubt­ed was Matthew. Church tra­di­tion said it was writ­ten by Matthew, a tax col­lec­tor who became a dis­ci­ple of Jesus, a wit­ness to events. Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian cler­gy and schol­ars said they believe the book of Matthew was writ­ten between A.D. 40 and 60, with­in Matthew’s life­time.

But oth­er schol­ars con­clud­ed the Gospel was­n’t writ­ten any ear­li­er than A.D. 85, per­haps as late as A.D. 135, long after Matthew’s death. If the author was­n’t a wit­ness, the think­ing goes, the Gospel becomes less cred­i­ble.

So to schol­ars the dat­ing is impor­tant.

In an essay writ­ten for the book Passover and East­er: Ori­gin and His­to­ry to Mod­ern Times, Israel J. Yuval of Jerusalem’s Hebrew Uni­ver­si­ty report­ed a find in the Tal­mud that appears to show Matthew could have been writ­ten ear­li­er than some schol­ars con­tend.

Yuval wrote that a lead­ing rab­bini­cal schol­ar of the time was “con­sid­ered to have authored a sophis­ti­cat­ed par­o­dy of the Gospel accord­ing to Matthew.”

The par­o­dy, writ­ten by a rab­bi known as Gamaliel, is believed by some well-respect­ed lib­er­al Chris­t­ian schol­ars to have been writ­ten about A.D. 73 or ear­li­er.

The fact the par­o­dy exists and the date when it was believed to be writ­ten “would under­cut bad­ly (bib­li­cal crit­ics’) claims of a late date of A.D. 85–90 or lat­er,” said Bob New­man, pro­fes­sor of New Tes­ta­ment at Bib­li­cal The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary in Penn­syl­va­nia.

Ques­tions about free will ever keep you up at night? I just read a great ram­bling round­table of an essay called Faith and The Sci­ence of Free Will.

It’s a response to an essay by John Hor­gan in the New York Times, which reads in part: A cou­ple of books I’ve been read­ing late­ly have left me brood­ing over the pos­si­bil­i­ty that free will is as much a myth as divine jus­tice. The chief offend­er is The Illu­sion of Con­scious Will, by Dr. Daniel M. Weg­n­er, a psy­chol­o­gist at Har­vard.… We think of will as a force, but actu­al­ly, Dr. Weg­n­er says, it is a feeling—“merely a feel­ing,” as he puts it—of con­trol over our actions. I think, “I’m going to get up now,” and when I do a moment lat­er, I cred­it that feel­ing with hav­ing been the insti­gat­ing cause. But as we all know, cor­re­la­tion does not equal cau­sa­tion.

The exchanges (sev­er­al peo­ple com­ment) are insight­ful, such as this one: My response to this is based on The Voli­tion­al Brain: Towards a Neu­ro­science of Free Will, edit­ed by Ben­jamin Libet (Imprint Aca­d­e­m­ic, 2000). As I under­stand it, Libet was actu­al­ly one of the sci­en­tists involved in the exper­i­ments that Dr. Weg­n­er refers to. The fact that Libet’s posi­tion is nowhere men­tioned makes me very sus­pi­cious of Weg­n­er’s agen­da.

The con­scious will appears to be ini­ti­at­ed by an uncon­scious brain event. If the exper­i­ment is cor­rect, then this calls into ques­tion free will. But Libet says the con­scious will can veto these sub­con­scious deci­sions (see page 51 of The Voli­tion­al Brain). The con­scious veto may itself have a pre­ced­ing uncon­scious process. But this would become an uncon­scious choice of which we become con­scious rather than a con­scious­ly causal event (52). The con­scious veto is a con­trol func­tion, not just sim­ply becom­ing aware of a wish to act. The role of con­scious free will would be, then, not to ini­ti­ate a vol­un­tary act, but rather to con­trol whether the act takes place. The eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions of this are actu­al­ly con­sis­tent with most eth­i­cal and reli­gious sys­tems. Most of the Ten Com­mand­ments are thou-shall-not com­mand­ments (54). The exper­i­ments cit­ed by Weg­n­er give us no indi­ca­tion that actions can­not be con­scious­ly con­trolled.

Pret­ty cool stuff. You can read an expand­ed ver­sion of the essay here.

Charles Col­son just brought anoth­er Chris­t­ian Nobel Lau­re­ate to my atten­tion: Arno Pen­zias. Dr. Pen­zias won the Nobel Prize in Physics for co-dis­cov­er­ing cos­mic back­ground radi­a­tion.

Dr. Pen­zias says, “The cre­ation of the uni­verse is sup­port­ed by all the observ­able data astron­o­my has pro­duced so far. As a result, the peo­ple who reject the data can arguably be described as hav­ing a �religious� belief.” That is, peo­ple who refuse to con­sid­er the evi­dence because it con­flicts with their pre­con­ceived ideas are fol­low­ing a “dog­ma” in the most stub­born sense of the word.

In an arti­cle in Per­spec­tives on Sci­ence and Chris­t­ian Faith, Pen­zias told Dr. Jer­ry Bergman of the Amer­i­can Sci­en­tif­ic Affil­i­a­tion, “I invite you to exam­ine the snap­shot pro­vid­ed by half a century�s worth of astro­phys­i­cal data and see what the pieces of the uni­verse actu­al­ly look like.… In order to achieve con­sis­ten­cy with our obser­va­tions we must … assume not only cre­ation of mat­ter and ener­gy out of noth­ing, but cre­ation of space and time as well.”

Pen­zias, a Nobel Prize win­ner, added, “The best data we have are exact­ly what I would have pre­dict­ed had I had noth­ing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.”

Read the rest of Col­son’s com­men­tary…

I’m updat­ing the list of famous sci­en­tists who believe.

Lon­don’s Tele­graph had an unusu­al­ly bal­anced arti­cle on how lead­ing sci­en­tists think about God.

The occa­sion? The 50th anniver­sary of the dis­cov­ery of DNA.
The play­ers? Wat­son & Crick (dis­cov­er­ers of DNA, both athe­ists) and Fran­cis Collins (head of the Human Genome Project, devout Chris­t­ian).

In Crick­’s mind, “The god hypoth­e­sis is rather dis­cred­it­ed.” Indeed, he says his dis­taste for reli­gion was one of his prime motives in the work that led to the sen­sa­tion­al 1953 dis­cov­ery.

“I went into sci­ence because of these reli­gious rea­sons, there’s no doubt about that. I asked myself what were the two things that appear inex­plic­a­ble and are used to sup­port reli­gious beliefs: the dif­fer­ence between liv­ing and non­liv­ing things, and the phe­nom­e­non of con­scious­ness.”

And accord­ing to Wat­son, “Every time you under­stand some­thing, reli­gion becomes less like­ly,” said Wat­son. “Only with the dis­cov­ery of the dou­ble helix and the ensu­ing genet­ic rev­o­lu­tion have we had grounds for think­ing that the pow­ers held tra­di­tion­al­ly to be the exclu­sive prop­er­ty of the gods might one day be ours.”

But Collins (who has suc­ceed­ed Wat­son as head of the Human Genome Project), believes that reli­gion and sci­ence “are nice­ly com­ple­men­tary and mutu­al­ly sup­port­ing”, he said. As one exam­ple, his research to find the faulty gene respon­si­ble for cys­tic fibro­sis pro­vid­ed sci­en­tif­ic exhil­a­ra­tion and “a sense of awe at uncov­er­ing some­thing that God knew before that we humans did­n’t”.

“The tragedy is that many peo­ple believe that, if evo­lu­tion is true, which it clear­ly is, then God can’t be true… God decid­ed to cre­ate a species with whom he could have fel­low­ship. Who are we to say that evo­lu­tion was a dumb way to do it? It was an incred­i­bly ele­gant way to do it.”

“Jim, who I know much bet­ter than Fran­cis, avoids bring­ing this top­ic up when we are hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion.”

The arti­cle con­cludes with what I found to be a sad­ly amus­ing sto­ry of Crick­’s antipa­thy to faith. You real­ly ought to read the whole thing.

In that class that I guest-lec­tured in I field­ed some ques­tions from athe­ists. I’ve been reflect­ing on athe­ism since then, and I’d like to offer a refine­ment of my thoughts.

First, a dis­claimer. It is pos­si­ble that some­one could find this hurt­ful or offen­sive. I do not seek to delib­er­ate­ly offend, but I do seek to be hon­est. It seems to me that athe­ism has sev­er­al seri­ous prob­lems, and I am about to address one of them: athe­is­m’s intrin­isic divorce from moral­i­ty. This is not a per­son­al attack on anyone–in fact, you can be an athe­ist and also be quite a moral per­son. But if you are an athe­ist you do not have a com­pelling rea­son to be moral (or even to believe that moral­i­ty is a mean­ing­ful con­cept), and that is what I want to address.

I can sum up what I’ve been think­ing in one phrase: athe­ism is amoral. Amoral­i­ty flows direct­ly from a rejec­tion of all non­ma­te­r­i­al real­i­ty.

Allow me to explain: a moral law is an entire­ly dif­fer­ent sort of thing than a law of physics. You can­not get a moral ‘ought’ from a mate­r­i­al ‘is.’

If all we are is a col­lec­tion of par­ti­cles arranged in a com­pli­cat­ed fash­ion, then there is no com­pelling rea­son to sup­pose that any motion of those par­ti­cles is log­i­cal­ly prefer­able to any oth­er. Say, for instance, a col­lec­tion of par­ti­cles dri­ving a knife through anoth­er col­lec­tion of par­ti­cles ver­sus a col­lec­tion of par­ti­cles nurs­ing anoth­er, small­er col­lec­tion of par­ti­cles.
Con­tin­ue read­ing “Reflec­tions on Athe­ism and Amoral­i­ty”

Accord­ing to the Asso­ci­at­ed Press, archael­o­gists have found a very spe­cial tablet.

Israeli geol­o­gists said Mon­day they have exam­ined a stone tablet detail­ing repair plans for the Jew­ish Tem­ple of King Solomon that, if authen­ti­cat­ed, would be a rare piece of phys­i­cal evi­dence con­firm­ing bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive.

The find — whose ori­gin is murky — is about the size of a legal pad, with a 15-line inscrip­tion in ancient Hebrew that strong­ly resem­bles descrip­tions in the Bible’s Book of Kings. It could also strength­en Jew­ish claims to a dis­put­ed holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City that is now home to two major mosques.

…

The sand­stone tablet has a 15-line inscrip­tion in ancient Hebrew that resem­bles descrip­tions in Kings II, 12:1–6, 11–17, said Israel’s Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey, which exam­ined the arti­fact. The words refer to King Joash, who ruled the area 2,800 years ago.

In it, the king tells priests to take “holy mon­ey … to buy quar­ry stones and tim­ber and cop­per and labor to car­ry out the duty with faith.” If the work is com­plet­ed well, “the Lord will pro­tect his peo­ple with bless­ing,” reads the last sen­tence of the inscrip­tion.

It’s inter­est­ing, but I should note that there seems to be much more con­fu­sion over this tablet’s authen­tic­i­ty than over the James ossuary.

The church too often gets a neg­a­tive rep on the col­lege cam­pus. Con­sid­er this: “Would any­one notice if our church closed down tomor­row?” a preach­er asked his con­gre­ga­tion. Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty researcher Robert D. Put­nam says yes, Chris­tian­i­ty and oth­er reli­gions do make a dif­fer­ence in Amer­i­can soci­ety. (source)

Some high­lights:
* half of all per­son­al phil­an­thropy is reli­gious in char­ac­ter, and half of all vol­un­teer­ing occurs in a reli­gious con­text.
* Church­go­ers are sub­stan­tial­ly more like­ly to be involved in sec­u­lar orga­ni­za­tions and to have deep­er infor­mal social con­nec­tions.
* In one sur­vey it was mem­ber­ship in reli­gious groups that was most close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with oth­er forms of civic involve­ment, like vot­ing, jury ser­vice, com­mu­ni­ty projects, talk­ing with neigh­bors, and giv­ing to char­i­ty.

Food for thought…

In yet anoth­er case of archael­o­gy con­firm­ing the bib­li­cal record, schol­ars recent­ly announced the dis­cov­ery of an ancient ossuary bear­ing the inscrip­tion James, son of Joseph, broth­er of Jesus.

The rel­ic has been dat­ed to just before 70 A.D., which jives with the bib­li­cal dat­ing of the death of James.

You can read the details at Chris­tian­i­ty Today (very pro), Nation­al Geo­graph­ic (pret­ty neu­tral), and the New York Times (slight­ly skep­ti­cal).

Inci­den­tal­ly, you might be intrigued to note that the inscrip­tion pro­nounced pho­net­i­cal­ly sounds like “Yacob son of Yussef broth­er of Yeshua.”

Yacob? Who’s Yacob?

James and Jacob are both legit­i­mate Eng­lish equiv­a­lents of the Hebrew Yacob.
Betcha did­n’t learn that in Sun­day School…

I’ve heard that this dates back to trans­la­tion of the King James Bible. As you prob­a­bly know, names are often rad­i­cal­ly changed when Angli­cized, and often for non­pho­net­ic rea­sons. The sto­ry I heard claimed that the trans­la­tors of the King James Bible decid­ed to dub the broth­er of Jesus James as a thank-you to their spon­sor. It sounds like an urban leg­end to me, but stranger things have hap­pened.