Substitutionary Atonement
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Sin | No Comments »Recently I was listening to some atheists discussing their concerns regarding the idea of the substitutionary atonement of Christ. Basically, that's just a big, fancy term for the fact that Jesus died for our sins. Nothing more complicated than that. Here is the misunderstanding that I heard based on how the conversation went. They don't get how someone else can be punished in our place. If we are the ones who have sinned, then someone else ...
Omniscience vs. Free Will
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in God's Character | No Comments »In a recent atheist podcast that I subscribe to, the hosts were discussing the idea of the omniscience of God and how this somehow contradicts the idea of free will. Their argument was basically that, if God already knows what you're going to do and the things you or I will choose before you do so, then you and I have not choice but to make that choice. Normally, I am quite pleased and even pleasantly surprised ...
Extraordinary Events
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Miracles | No Comments »If I had a nickel for every time I heard a non-believer claim that "extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence" I would be independently wealthy. The irony of this is that usually it's the people who claim to be the most intellectually honest. In fact, these are the group who are quick to cast dispersions on Christians (or other theists) for committing the very crime for which they themselves are guilty. The man credited for this idea ...
Who Designed the Designer?
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | No Comments »Originally, I had wanted to write something about a quote that I had read from Richard Dawkins where he said something to the effect that, by all outward appearances, if we didn't know any better, it looks like life is the product of design. I couldn't find that quote, however, but instead found a large number of hits for a different quote from Dawkins. Over and over again, I found countless hits (and now, here is ...
Atheist or Agnostic?
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Christian Living | No Comments »In the past, I had often thought a certain way regarding the difference between someone who claims to be an atheist versus someone claiming to be agnostic. My understanding had been that atheism was a very arrogant claim. My understanding was that to be an atheist, one was claiming that there was certainly no God. It seemed to me that this was an impossible claim unless one knew first-hand of the existence of every single ...
Oral Tradition and the Telephone Game
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | No Comments »Today, I heard what was most likely the most laughable argument against the historicity of the gospels that I have ever heard. It was a comparison of the oral tradition which passed down the accounts of Jesus of Nazareth until they were written down against the game of "Telephone." Basically, the idea here was based on the idea that most scholars put the first written gospels at between 20 and 25 years after Christ's death, burial ...
Adding New DNA Information via Random Mutation
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | No Comments »If you've been following along, over the past few weeks I've been breaking down some of the problems that I have with things like evolution and natural selection. Today, I want to address a concept that has been gaining popularity in order to explain how new genetic information could be generated. For a long time, evolution and natural selection went hand-in-hand, but we didn't really hear as much about the idea of random mutation. If you ...
Natural Selection as a Mechanism for Evolution
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | No Comments »A couple weeks ago, I started going over evolution and defining some terms in order to touch on various aspects of evolution and various theories about how that works. This week, I want to touch on natural selection as a mechanism for evolution (macro-evolution). When people think of Charles Darwin, they think of "the theory of evolution." As I pointed out already, however, Darwin did not develop the theory of evolution. What his theory was about ...
Evolution Lacks Explanatory Scope/Power
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | No Comments »Last week, I started laying the groundwork with respect to evolution, natural selection and random mutation. As before, for the purposes of this post, "evolution" will be used to refer to "macro-evolution" or the evolving of one species into another species. And for today, I want to focus a bit on evolution itself outside of the mechanisms of natural selection and random mutation. One of the more hotly debated issues of evolution these days is the ...
Evolution, Natural Selection & Random Mutation
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »There are some thoughts that I wanted to put down regarding the ideas of what has commonly been called the "Theory of Evolution." I'm not certain that I'll get to all of this in one post, so we'll see how this goes. The first thing that I want to do is make some distinctions among some various terms that get bandied about today and debated, argued, etc. Those terms are "evolution," "natural selection," and "random mutation."
