Advocating Reality

Just a quick addendum to my review of 'God's Not Dead', and also a comment about the current state of Apologetics. The Problem of Evil, simply put, is the idea that an All-Powerful 'God' would be able to abolish evil and apparently has chosen not to do so. To many, this idea of a 'God' is evil itself. Imagine, if you will, a grown man raping a 2-year old toddler. Now imagine that an all-powerful bearded man in the sky is watching this unfold, yet doing nothing. For myself, I consider this being to be completely immoral. If it were a human watching this happen, with the power to stop it yet not doing so, we would never hesitate to call the person completely immoral. Why is it so different for a 'God'? Well, according to the movie and to current Apologetics, the solution to the Problem of Evil is 'Free Will'. By abolishing evil in this world, such a being would be abrogating human 'Free Will'. This seems to make sense on the surface...

If, for the moment, we accept the Creationist argument that our scientific observations regarding the age of the Earth are off by a scale of about 1:750,000 (6,000 years versus 4.5 billion), then it logically follows that our method should be proportionally ‘off’ by about the same amount.  We should be able to recalculate our findings accordingly and, on paper, this should match up our findings to be closer to the Creationist claims.   I am basing these calculations on an ending point of 8/1/2014 at 8:00 AM (the date that I originally wrote this article). So, for instance, the claim is that the Earth was created on or around 4,000 BCE, compared to the scientific view of the Earth forming about 4.5 billion years ago.  We will now synchronize our Scientific chronology to this timetable and see what happens. Just for contrast, according to Science, in 4000 BCE the wooden plow is being used in central Europe. Agriculture has spread to what today is Britain and Irela...

The first episode of the Advocating Reality podcast is up!  I did this one on my own, but I'm hoping to have a co-host or two for the next one. This episode is an introduction to me and to the podcast, and the official topic is "Evolution, Creationism and Intelligent Design". Comments are welcome! Advocating Reality Podcast #1 - Evolution, Creationism & Intelligent Design Links mentioned in this podcast: My YouTube channel:   http://www.youtube.com/user/ddarklighter?feature=mhum TalkOrigins - http://talkorigins.org Email me at advocatingreality@gmail.com Opening Theme: Feed On Me Music Provided By freeplaymusic.com Composed by:Jeffrey N Ayers, Brandon Towers, Matthew P Dana, Matthew A Mrowka, Eric J Donovan, all ASCAP Published by: Freeplaynjj, ASCAP (50%), Rebekah M Music, ASCAP (50%)

There are some critical misunderstandings of evolution out there, and I’d like to help clear some of them up. Ray Comfort is offering $10,000 to the first person who provides evidence of a ‘living transitional form’, and he defines this as a species giving birth to an entirely different species, such as a squirrel giving birth to a bird, or a chicken giving birth to a snake.  Now, I personally think Ray is being patently dishonest, but this raises a good point about what people seem to think evolution is all about. Let’s say that you are a paleontologist, and you have discovered fossils of a previously undocumented animal.  What you are looking at is a snapshot in time, as it were.  A ‘species’ is just that - it is a group of animals with particular shared characteristics, and when you look at a particular species, you are actually seeing the ‘current version’ of that genetic lineage.  If you take our hypothetical fossil find, you can determine approximately when...