Last week, I posted my thoughts on the substitutionary atonement of Christ. At the end of that post, I posed a question that I promised to address this week. It’s “next week” now, so I suppose I should keep my promise and address this issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
