How did Richard Dawkins evolve his yellow streak?

Any fans of Monty Python may remember Brave Sir Robin, who “bravely ran away”. Well, it’s not just for fictional knights, but also over-indulged atheists. Richard Dawkins was a no show at last night’s debating opportunity at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, having penned a snooty note in the Guardian all about how William Lane-Craig wasn’t good enough to debate him, whether this is measured by academic repute, or by moral standing. His latest beef with the man he refuses to debate is that he doesn’t like him defending God having lots of people killed in the Old Testament. Should have been an easy win for Dawkins then, except for his own rejection of objective morality and acceptance of infanticide, which kinds of limits how much he can clutch at that particular straw.
When Dawkins published ‘The God Delusion’ I made sure I was familiar with it, even getting his audio narration so I wouldn’t miss any intonation that might help, but it was such a disappointment. It is not even competent atheism. It is just polemic, and having some familiarity with his would-be opponent’s work, which is very competent philosophy and theology, I can see why Dawkins was running scared.
It’s been a bad few years for atheism. Apart from all the bravado of the new atheists:- Dawkins doing such a bad job on his book; being seen to lose some arguments and run away from others; and their loss of the 20th Century’s top atheist philosopher, Professor Anthony Flew, when he came to the view that there probably was a God after all. All in all, not good, and so I’m charitably linking this video made by an atheist, which shows that even he doesn’t believe Dawkins any more.

Theology Matters

Will you do a moral 180 in the next 30 minutes?

Watch this video and see if your worldview survives the 180 test…

Objections Christians Have to Polygamy 2) The ‘One Flesh’ Gambit

We now have the second in our series of presentations on Objections Christians have to Polygamy. This addresses the ‘One Flesh’ gambit and lasts less than 5 minutes.

Here are the links for YouTube and the HD version on Vimeo. If you like them, tell your friends. The Vimeo version can be played directly below.

Objections Christians Have To Polygamy 2) The ‘One Flesh’ Gambit from AdamAndEveIt.info on Vimeo.

Objections Christians Have to Polygamy 1) The Adam and Eve Defence – video links

We now have a full set of video links for the first in our series of presentations examining objections Christians have to polygamy. The first is the Adam and Eve Defence, and lasts less than 5 minutes.

Here are the links for YouTube and the HD version on Vimeo. If you like them, don’t forget to tell your friends/social networks, and it will encourage us to produce more.

Vimeo HD movie for Christian Objections to Polygamy 1) The Adam and Eve Defence

Objections Christians Have To Polygamy 1) The Adam and Eve Defence from AdamAndEveIt.info on Vimeo.

Objections Christians Have to Polygamy – 1) The Adam And Eve Defence

Evolution as Bad Science – 11) And finally….

Let’s finish with what eminent evolutionist Steven Jay Gould called the trade secret of paleontology. The key word in the term “missing link” is missing. If evolution were true we would see transitional forms in the fossil record, something on its way to being something else. But with all the furore and clamour for publicity, not a single one has ever been found. Bill Bryson’s “Brief History of Everything” admits that all the bones that exist that are supposed to be ancestors of man would fit in a family car. And there are no transitional fossils between them, and no evidence that they really were anyone’s grand-daddy. Charles Darwin openly worried about the lack of missing links in the fossil record. He thought it was an argument against his theory, but put the problem off till the future, hoping that generations of fossil-hunters would find one for him. But there’s been nothing, nada, zilch. It just didn’t happen.

Some folk make a career out of evolution. They give speeches and sell books knocking the idea that God made us, and make a living out of making a monkey out of you. The BBC and the Discovery Channel help them along with the approach that blind repetition will make people believe them, and sadly, for the most part, that is what happens. But it doesn’t matter how many people believe it or how often they repeat it- if it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen.

Evolution’s success as a theory is dependent on the fact that it meets a very specific demand – the demand for some reason to reject God, so that we can reject the requirements he places on us. People don’t take heroin because it’s good for them – they take it because they like how it makes them feel. It’s the same with evolution – it will give you “the pleasures of sin for a season” – but ultimately it screws you up, and ignores the reality of a Creator who made us all, and who sent his Son to die for us, and to defeat death so that we can have forgiveness through him – if we’re willing to accept him as our Lord.

Evolution as Bad Science – 10) Living Fossils

No, not members of the House of Lords, but those rather embarrassing little creatures that ain’t when they should be. Now, as you and I both know, one of the key elements of the fossil Job Description is ‘being dead’. Go, climb a mountain, find a rock, split it open with a hammer, find something that looks like a sea creature, and while you consider whether this is evidence of whether the world was once covered by a global flood, like it says in Genesis, also take time to notice that this creature is an ex-creature. It is no-more. It has shuffled off this mortal coil. It is dead. Yet everything from sharks to Gingko plants have been called “living fossils” – and why? – because they are still alive, yet we find fossils of the same types of creature in rocks that evolutionists claim are think-of-a-number hundred million years old. Which becomes a worry once you work out one of the main ways biologists and geologists date rocks. The biologists date the fossils from the sorts of rocks they find them in – they trust the geologists. The geologists date the rocks from the sort of fossils found in them – they trust the biologists. And this is one big circular argument, just waiting to be punctured – except that it already has been, by the “living fossils”. You see, if the geologists are right, then the shark has been swimming around for 75 million years and hasn’t changed a bit – your Gingko plant has lasted even longer, and the last century’s chief candidate for “fish that walked”, the allegedly 300-million-year-old Coelacanth, turned up in the Indian Ocean in the 1940’s (oh and by the way, didn’t have legs, but fins as it turned out, and didn’t walk on to a beach, it’s a deep sea fish – bad luck chaps! Guess again!). This is a problem for evolution – 300 million years, and nothing happened – not one little change – and yet the dinosaurs are supposed to have risen and fallen, followed by me and thee in that time. One biography of early long-age theorist James Hutton is entitled “The Man Who Found Time”. Evolution needs to invent lots and lots of time in which things can happen – the more the better – just add time, and maybe people will believe that what is impossible will surely happen if you just wait long enough. But time isn’t just a place where you can hide all the evidence you mysteriously haven’t found yet – it is the enemy of evolution, allowing for more decay and a greater genetic burden. However long you’ve got, it still doesn’t work. And as for the 300 million years? – Well, when Mount Saint Helens blew its top in 1980, one scamp by the name of Dr. Steve Austin waited for the lava to cool, took a sample and sent it off to the lab for dating. The lab said it formed 300 million years ago – it wasn’t even 3 years old – it formed on camera in front of the entire world. Radiometric dating methods assume too much to be reliable.

Evolution as Bad Science – 9) Harry Hill

Harry Hill has noted that the type of people who tend to be vegetarians, are the same bunch of people who tend to go on about saving the environment. “Well”, says Harry, “perhaps there would be a bit more of the environment if you lot weren’t going around eating all the plants.” – I mean, how many burgers can you get out of the average cow? And how many beans do you have to kill to make a bean burger! – – All of which serves to introduce an important point – the interdependence of plants and animals. A little bit of basic biology will teach you that people and animals take oxygen from the atmosphere and produce carbon dioxide. Plants, on the other hand, tend to take the carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. Which all works out really well. But on the timescales favoured by evolutionary biology it presents a problem. Have either side around for too long on their own and eventually they’ll use up the gas they need, and die. So you need both plants and animals and you need them to evolve at reasonably similar times – what a stroke of luck that they’re both here at the same time! And it isn’t just oxygen. Interdependence is a widely acknowledged feature of individuals and ecological systems. Evolution depends on bits being added randomly over millions of years, but if you depend on something, you can’t just wait millions of years for it to happen. Interdependence is seen across the planet, in your own body, and even inside your cells. And it isn’t just humans, but pretty much any function of any creature. A giraffe doesn’t just slowly develop a long neck – it needs a system to regulate the blood pressure in its head and cope with the differences from when nosing through the tree-tops to bending down and sniffing the grass. No system, no giraffe. The Bombardier Beetle needs to manufacture two chemicals in the right quantities to mix and explode and to only bring them together at the right moment, and in a way which doesn’t prejudice the Beetle itself, and so it carries around a heavy chamber to help it do all this. A beetle with a chamber and no chemicals is a slow soon-to-be-dead beetle. A beetle with all the right chemicals and no chamber is technically known as an explosion – and they don’t have descendents. Evolution cannot produce the inter-dependence seen in nature. Want some more? – then Exercise your Wonder…