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Substitutionary Atonement

March 9th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Sin | Comments Off

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 should not be punished. The analogy that they used was a big brother getting punished for the fact that the little brother did something wrong.

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Omniscience vs. Free Will

March 2nd, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in God's Character | 2 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 at the fact that these hosts are very intellectually careful about what they say and how they present arguments. Granted, I obviously don’t always agree with their conclusions, but I respect their diligence for truth. In this case, however, I was quite surprised at this argument and the conclusion they came to. Not because of a simple disagreement, but because the argument simply wasn’t sound to begin with.

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Extraordinary Events

February 24th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Miracles | Comments Off

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 of extraordinary events requiring extraordinary evidence is 18th century philosopher, David Hume. Hume was a materialist. His worldview was such that miracles were completely impossible on the basis that they would have to have a cause which was not materialistic. Since he did not believe in the existence of anything other than the material world, any evidence of anything which could even potentially be miraculous was dismissed out of hand.

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Who Designed the Designer?

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 one more) where Dawkins was quoted as asking some variation of the question, “Who designed the designer?” This is his refutation of the Intelligent Design theory (ID). In some sense, I find this quote almost as absurd as the one that I was looking for in the first place.

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Atheist or Agnostic?

February 10th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Christian Living | Comments Off

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 thing in the entire universe.

My thinking, therefore, was that one could never legitamately be less than agnostic. In actuality, I still actually think this is true with one exception. I don’t actually think that this understanding of “atheist” is accurate. Coming tot his understanding is a result of, ironically, my studies in apologetics. One main thing that I learned in my studies has been that absolute certainty is not necessary to claim a belief about something.

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Oral Tradition and the Telephone Game

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 and resurrection. (Yes, I know that most scholars only agree on the first two.) Therefore, for the first 20 to 25 years, the events later recorded in the gospels were passed down via oral tradition, or the telling of stories from one generation to the next.

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Adding New DNA Information via Random Mutation

January 26th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | Comments Off

DNAIf 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 haven’t read last week’s post on natural selection, this will not make as much sense, so I recommend going back and reading through that first. In fact, I’d recommend starting with the first post in this series.

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Natural Selection as a Mechanism for Evolution

January 19th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | Comments Off

dog-furA 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 was the concept of natural selection as a mechanism for evolution.

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Evolution Lacks Explanatory Scope/Power

January 12th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Evangelism | Comments Off

evolutionLast 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 alleged lack of what are called “transitional forms.” This refers to the idea that, in the fossil record, one would expect to find fossils of creatures who exhibit various stages of form from one species to another. Evolutionists, of course, claim that these transitional forms exist and creationists claim that they do not.

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The Supreme Good (the Chief End of Man)

January 6th, 2010 by Ty Wallace posted in Christian Living | Comments Off

“What is the chief end of man?” It is a question as old as the existence of man himself. Not only is this a very important question we should be asking ourselves (as well as know the answer to) but there is really no way a person can avoid it, although many try.

And how so? If not by brushing it under a rug, people will take on one or more of the various philosophies of life currently present in our culture, all in an attempt to answer this most important question.

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