The Problem of Naturalism

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | No Comments »

Lately, I've thought a bit about the idea of what is known as "naturalism."  There have been a lot of different thoughts about why this philosophy does not have the explanatory scope or power necessary to explain much of the universe. However, I've been thinking about a different aspect of naturalism lately. Mostly, I've been thinking about how closed-minded and limited this worldview is. Ironic that I would feel that way, considering most people would argue ...

Take My Word for It

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | Comments Off

Several months ago, I had written about the idea of non-believers not accepting the books of the New Testament as evidence of actual events. What they are looking for is "extra-biblical texts" to corroborate what the Bible says. In like fashion, I recently heard one atheist mention (several times, actually) that a person's personal testimony of an experience with God would not be sufficient evidence to make a claim of His existence. Now, to a degree, ...

Who Designed the Designer?

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | Comments Off

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 ...

Oral Tradition and the Telephone Game

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

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 ...

Let’s Talk About Jesus…Nicely!

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | 16 Comments »

I cannot say that my memory is not what it used to be. It's been bad for as long as I can remember. So, just from last week to this week, I had already forgotten that I was going to write about this topic and I had already written a whole post about something completely different. Fortunately, I caught myself and will post the other article next week. For this week, I want to continue where ...

The Truth Hurts…But It’s Still the Truth

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 by Dan Carrington posted in Christian Living, Evangelism | 7 Comments »

Interesting thing about truth...it's true whether you want it to be or not. Sometimes we like it. Sometimes it doesn't matter either way. Other times, however, we don't particularly like it at all. It's those times that we have to be very careful. The Church in America today has to be very careful when it comes to truth. You see, so many of us tend to base what is true on how we feel about a ...

Sifting the Evidence Part 2

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 by Dan Carrington posted in Bible & Scripture, Evangelism | Comments Off

Last week, I wrote about how we cannot simply ignore the written eye-witness testimonies regarding Jesus of Nazareth, the miracles He performed, His resurrection from the dead, etc. As in today's court system, such eye-witness accounts are, and should be, taken very seriously and are often cited as some of the most powerful evidence of any given case. This week, let's take a look at some of the actual physical evidence of the existence of God ...