A Blast At Science's Contemptible Misrepresentation of Christianity

 I'm SO tired of hearibng this from the smug "science" people  and stheists who  attack "religion" as a mental aberration.  Richard Dawkins carries on in this way and here's someone else, another scientist, doing the same thing.  I don't know who he is and I don't care.  I heard about half a minute of this video and had to write this post:

Steven Weinberg: All Time Best Arguments Against Religion #1 - YouTube

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PuhLEEZE stop lumping Protestant Christianity with Islam for starters, there is NO similarity between the two "religions>"  None.  Zip, nada, none.    RThere is also very little commonality between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.  Whther they are guilty of this charge orf not I'm not even going to speculate, I'm only concerned to correct the complete misrepresentation of Protestantism.

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This guy says the main conflict between science and "religion" is tin the method of approach to trtuh.  Supposely all "religion" decides questions of truth on the basis of authority, and science does not.  Again I'm not going to consider to what extent this charge may or may not be true of Islam or Roman Catholicism, but it most certainly is false concerning Protestantism.

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The word Dawkins likes is "faith" to stand for the most vilified method of "religion."  Supposedly "religion" applies "faith" every question of every kind.  Yikes.  Again leave aside Islam and ROmanism.  I doubt it's even true of those two false religions but it most certainly is not true of Protestant Christianity, which is TRUE Christianity.  The biblical definition is "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseeen."  THAT's how we use faith.  Fiath is our necessary posture toward GOD and toward the things of God.  We are exhorted over and over again in scripture to believe, believe in what scripture is telling is about GOD, not in anything else.  Believe in Christ, beliecve He is the Messiah, believe in tghe miracles He performed, believe in the accounts of his life and in fact all the accounts of the Bible.  WE ARE NOT ASKED TO APPLY FAITH TO ANY OTHER QUESYIONS.  Certainly not to scientific questions.  And it is so utterly ridiculous and annoying that the could think such a think I'm having trouble sstaying calm as I write this.

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Faith is necessary with things of the spirit that we cannot observe.  We must trust those who have witnessed them and lived them, that's the only way we can know about them.   The miracles were cddone to authenticate the claims of Christ to be Christ.  We weren't there, we have no choice but to believe or disbelieve what tthe writers of the Bible report about them to us.   Jesus was willing to show thomas His wounds to prove to Him empirically that He did indeed die and rise again, but He also said "blessed are those who did not see and yet believewd."  We are to truth trustworthy people.  Thomsa  had refused to believe what the other disiples had told Himj.  He was blessed to get the direct proof, but the majority of believers don't get that kind of proof.  We are relegated to treusting the witnesses, and there are scroes and scrores of switnesses who in my judgment are utterly trustworthy, from the writers of the Bible to the people they write about to people who have believede tghe Bible accounts from that time on.

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WE DO NOT USE FAITH TO DETERMINE THE TRUTHS OF SCFIENCE.  In fact it was biblical treuth that was the original impetus to empirical science and if it had not existed we woudl still be flouding ing around with the old weird "science" of the Early Greeks an Romans and Aristotle

It's no doubt all about the Creation-Evolution debate, which they think is about science but evolution is barely a science at all because being a historical science, about events in the past that can never be replicated or tested, it has to remain noothing but speculation.   And since it contradicts the Bible we reject it both on the basis of our faith in the Bible and on the scientific reasoning creqationists have brought to bear on evolution's claims.    Faith has nothing to do with true science, science that is based on observation, but evolution is not based on observation, it can't be, it's purely invention. 

The Molecular Basis of Life

This is just plain astonishing.  I've seen many of these by now but wanted to post this one because it includes more of the story than some others I've seen.  this stuff is mind-blowing.  Microsopic molecules, proteins and whatnot, behave like sentient beings, craetures with minds that obey some kindof commands to perform their complicated tasks for the replication of DNA.   

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I dn't know why I can't get the video to come up for me burt here's the URL to the page:

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The Molecular Basis of Life - YouTube

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The most mind-boggling thing of all of course is how all these processes result in the features that make up a living organism.  How does the production of a protein by a gene result in a trait such as, oh, hair color or whatnot?   I don't think I've ever seen anyone even attempt to explain that.

Some Odd Manifestations of the Holy Spirit, Or . . .?

An odd little topic here. John MacArthur preached in a sermon I heard recently at You Tube, about the various thingsx that are attributed to the Holy Spirit in the charismatic churches. He listedn falling over backwards, laughing uncontrollable, shaking and quaking, the hiccups, jumping up and down and other things. I hadn't heard about the hiccups as an effect of the Holy Spirit, but all thhe rest is familiar to me from my time in the charismatic movement.

Some of it I'm sure he's right about, that that these things are not the work of the Holy Spirit. The laughter I know isn't. Watchman Nee wrote about that in his book Soul Power and made it quite clear that it comes from the flesh or from something in the soul left over from the powers God originally gavbe to Adam and Eve, but it doesn't come from the Holy Spirit.

Falling over backwards has always seemed to me to be unlikely but I'm not completely sure of that one. However, shaking and quaking have always seemed to me to be genuine manifestations of the Holy Spirit and I've experienced them many times. When you spend a lot of time with the Lord in prayer you may get the shakes and the quakes and I think that's a good sign that it's from God. The Quakers and the Shakers wer eaptly names for that particular experience. As I've spent a lot of time seeking the Lord in the last few months I've had that experience a few times after prolonged periods of prayer. Surely it is something that happens to us as a result of the Holy Spirit's working in us.
As for the hiccups, that one is very strange but I've also had bouts of the hiccups in this same period of intense seeking of the Lord, though I hadn't had hiccups for many yhears. I didn't connect it with my spiritual practices though until MacArthur mentioned it. Now I don't know. An odd one, that's for sure.

Dawkins Series on Darwinism

Well, it's all here, all laid out to be taken apart:



Darwin observes the variations between isolated populations of various species and sees no reason why a Creator would need to make versions of each Kind with small variations. This was within the cultural context of the day that considered each variation to be a separate creation by God. AAs I recall, there was also the idea that not only were they separate creations but some of them were created long after the Creation Week of Genesis. Im'm not enitrely sure about that, but at least they were considered to be separate creations.

Then he went on to ponder the structural similarities of various creatures, the fact that limbs, whether arms or wings or flippers or whatnot, are constructured with the same parts and funcdtions although in different proportions according to their different uses. This suggests to him that they are all related to each other.

It is Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, according to Dawkins, that persuaded DCarwin to the theory of Natural Sepection as the mechanism fore ecvolution from species to species. Those that succeeded best eitherat catching prey or escapting being caught would pass on their characteristics to their offspring in greatter numbers.Mbr> Mbr> According to Darwin it is modern genetics that clinches darwin's theory absolutiely , so that he can call it a Fact.

More Evolutionist Witlessness -- Imaginative Guesses Ordained As Science

Dawkins, like other evolutoinist thinkers, seems quite content to explain whatever he wants to explain in evolutionitic terms by whatever he able to dream up off the top of his head. So believe in God or gods becomes people's need to explain scary nature and somehow gods does the trick for them. That is enough to make Dawkins satisfied that he's arrived at something scientific it seems. No need to inquire whether that is in fact how the human mind works at all, which I strongly doubt. All he knows is that people believed in gods and it doesn't bother him to impos3e his own wild imaginings on them and call it science. That's all evolution is anyway, wild daydreams callsed fact. So whatever they want to explain they just imagine themselves into the situation and don't seem to think twoice about the inadeuqacy of their own modern minds to imagine themselves into another completely different cultural situationb or even into an animal's situation. Since there is no way to test their imaginary scenarios they get treated as scientific fact.

Even in Ebven in imagining our own time we get it wrong all the time, but imagining themselves into wholly different contexts is all it takes to make a fact out of a mental exercise? I think of something Jordan Peterson has talked about, how we would naturally expect that in the more liberal cultural and governmental systems where women's equality is strongly supported, that women would become more like men in their job preferences, but when this has been studied it turns out that no, women oddly enough don't fit the expectations, tin fact they grravitate MORE to traditional female roles even in jobpreferences, such as nursing over engineering and that sort of thing. Liberal expectations turn out to be wrong. So how is it imagining situations in the ancient past is just about ordained as Fact when there is no way to study it as this current situation is studied? Modern man's arrogance toward the peoples of ancient times.

Ande it most certainly is not Science. But then Evolution istself is not science, being founded on exactly the same sort of mental operations. Dream it up, call it fact. That's all there is to it.

Dawkins ignorantly attributes the ending of slavery in the west and the improvement of women's rights, to rationalistic thinking, though in fact both were brought aboutg my Christians. Certainly slavery was as the abolitionists in America and Wilberforce in particular in England were acting from their Christian principles. Dawkins thinks it's a matter of finding a verse here and there that can be used against slavery while there are others that suppo0rt slavery in the Bible, but the Christians who ended it rad the Bible as tending against slavery in its e3ntirety. As for women's rights, Jesus is known for his acceptance of women in a way none of th4e Jews of His day were, and that is the basis for mmost of the western equality movovements. The Bible accommodated the universal practice of slavery while ven in ancient Israel liberalizing laws for dealing with slaves and setting dates for them to be freed. You don't just forbid a universal practice that is a major part of the economy, that is a modern impositionj on the text. God is much wiser than that, He deals with people according to our weaknesses, and even in the New Testament Paul has to approach a slaveowner with careful appeals to his Christian belief to request theat he consider rfreeding a slave of his who is also a Christian. As for women's rights, it should be remembered that in the biblical context we learn that women were subjugated to men because of Eve's disobedience of God in e3atin gof the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. Ever since the Fall women have been subje8ugated to men and you can see that in every culture up until very recently and certainly see it in Muslim countries still. It was the influence of Christ that brought women into the modern world with rights, Christ who pay id penalty for original sin and began the process of freeing us from the effects of the Fall.

More Atheist Evolutionist Witlessness

How do these guys get away with it, KI mean the atheists, Dawkins and the rest of them. Mostly they are misrepresenting the opposition but the opposition does nothing to answer them, at least not anywhere near sufficiently. I've heard some really senseless answers to Dawkins from people who talk about their religious feelings, their sense of the presents of God and so on, but you'd think they'd know that isn't going to fly. Dawkins is wrog when he answers back that members of other religious have the esame experiences, but the audience doesn't know that. Some young guy reporting on the Ham0Nye debate was super impressed by Nye's sceincey talk. He doesn't discuss the points Nye made, he's just impressed that he was talking science, or really sciency talk. So part of the problem with this area of disc ussion is that people really just don't know much. ,br>
Dawkins is always sying that faith is without evidence and of course I want to answer for Christianity but a big problem is that Dawkins lumps together all the "abrahamic" religions which is already ab gig bogus concept, and then includes all the other religions of the world. Answering for Christianity I'd say that the Bible is tons and tons of evidence. that is what it was written for, to be evidence, evidence of the existence of the Craetor God, of the nature and charater of the Creatioor God, of His plan of redemption. It explains all the issues and events Dawkins and others complain about but they don't take any of it seriously so how can that be dealt with? If they start out dismissing it all as ancient fables with no reality, then go on to assault it from a modern moralistic perspective, not even known ting that their own morality derives from Christianity, it is hard to know where to start to answer them.

Dawkins thinks the doctrine of Original Sin is morally represhenisible somehow. When I first encountered good biblical discussions of it I wI loved it, to me it explains why the world is in the bad shape it's in, why there is murder, war, criminal behavior of all kinds,. How does evolution explain that? Dawkins and Hitchens when he was alive both attack the atonement of Christ for sin as if that too were a horrific moral offense. Good grief I wouldn't have thought it possible. Jesus died in our place because the penalty for sin is death. If we die for our sins we got to hell, but the sinless Son of God can die for us and save us al.