From the Inbox: Dinosaur Blood and Creationist Contentions

Oh, the Drama

Tyrannosaurus rex, Palais de la Découverte, Paris

Tyrannosaurus rex, Palais de la Découverte, Paris (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This post has turned out to be somewhat meaty, and it is permeated with a fascination real-life stage drama – dinosaurs, Jurassic Park, a good YouTube video, all intertwined with religious controversy and persecution, and wrapped up at the end with some lessons-learned and a challenge to My Fellow Christians. I hope the reader will enjoy the story as much as I have.

For my Christian readers, please do not miss the “My Fellow Christians” section at the end…

A New Type of Post

How it began… On a semi-frequent basis I now receive a range of emails from well-meaning friends on a range of subjects. I’m often sent links to science related articles. Sometimes I am sent queries about various biblical topics. I generally appreciate any information-oriented feedback. I try to take each point raised quite seriously.

After doing this several times, I’ve decided such content would make for good blog posts. I’ll post such information from time to time, always omitting the sender’s name, any personal comments, and in a generally sanitized form. I can see no reason that such information and time investment be limited in distribution to the original sender. The more information to the more people, the better. That said, here we go.

Dino Blood

A friend recently sent an email with a comment regarding dinosaur fossil finds that intrigued me. It essentially said the following: [Read more…]

Christian Agnosticism & Touching Earth

English: Arabic Question mark 한국어: 아랍어에서 사용하는 물음표

I have recognized a repeating pattern from my past conversations, both in person and online, which I believe lies at the very bedrock of believer’s objections to investigative discussions regarding belief, Christianity, and the Bible. Once evidential discussions have run their course, and once a retreat is beaten from that battlefield, believers will very often default to the inner keep of last resorts:

You cannot evaluate the truth of Christianity with analysis or reason or rational argument: you must either believe it on faith or not at all. It is about belief. It requires faith.

I have come to call this a “retreat to grey”, the falling back to a proposition that faith knowledge is different by category from other knowledge – as different as living organisms and dead stones. Things of the spirit cannot be interrogated by the same means as other truth claims. At bottom is an agnostic claim: we simply cannot “know” things in this realm, nor prove them, and certainly not disprove them, by any path of critical thinking or evidence.

But why do we think this? [Read more…]

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