Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, notes that in the United States, those who are predisposed to believe in the benefits of free-market capitalism and also most likely to be skeptical of the theory of evolution. These findings are unfortunate because if anyone should embrace the theory of evolution it is conservatives. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural … [Read more...]
About Brent Hardaway
You Gotta Be More Specific
A blogger named MarkCC demonstrates a few common misunderstandings regarding Intelligent Design (ID). First we need to clarify some terms, as there is some jargon given in the post that the reader may not be familiar with. Specified Event – The phrase “Go Take Out the Trash” is a specified arrangement of letters. The jumbled letter sequence “smets qwoand nduams iba” is … [Read more...]
Skeptics Can’t Have It Both Ways
Former L.A. County District Attorney and agnostic Vince Bugliosi believes that the problem of evil is fatal to believing in Christianity. “I’m an agnostic only on the issue of whether there is a God, a supernatural being who created the universe. I’m not an agnostic on the Christian God… while God can be all-powerful or all-good, he cannot be both, since these are … [Read more...]
What About God of the Gaps?
If you present the cosmological or design arguments to skeptics at least a few times, it’s extremely likely that you’ll hear the words “That’s a ‘God of the gaps’ argument.” This objection is rooted in the idea that because a number of things throughout human history have been wrongly attributed to the supernatural activity of God or gods, we can now safely dismiss God as a … [Read more...]
The Great Divorce and The Sexual Revolution
The Sexual Revolution had a long gestation period. While many may see it as something that suddenly sprung up in the 1960s, its vision had been cast in Western Civilization at least two hundred years before. Thinkers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, and Alfred Kinsey all had advocated for a breakdown of the traditional Christian taboos. While they … [Read more...]
The Least Popular Jewish Names
One of the more remarkable pieces of data in Richard Bauckham’s 2006 book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, is the comparison of Palestinian Jewish names in the Gospel period to those recorded in the Gospels themselves. ¹ He draws on the work of the Israeli scholar Tal Ilan, who compiled totals of all the recorded name occurrences in Palestinian Jews from 330 BC to 200 AD. The … [Read more...]